Unclean handling of AU with resulting project problems

2

Comments

  • Would be cool if you can locate Noir's crashlog (iOS Settings > Privacy > Analytics Data, there sould be file starting with "Noir" - just export that file (share icon in top left when you tap file) and send it to @brambos - i guess after he will look at it he will know if he can fix it or he should beat Matt for bug in NS :))

  • We will always have problems with single Apps and AUs.

    But NS2 needs a way to handle problematic AU in a way, that the project will not be destroyed or cannot be opened anymore.

    Some way to load a project without actually loading things or to disable the loading of Apps / AUs that made a problem earlier.

  • @klownshed said:
    One additional warning sign I’ve noticed is when I’m opening a project that has (or will soon get) locking up issues, more often than not I have a Ruismaker Noir track or two.

    When I open the project, a Noir hit gets triggered (double tap the project to load it and ‘Boom’ goes Noir!). Sometimes after that I lose all audio and if I go to a channel with a Noir instance, there’s a ‘loading UI’ message which just spins. All the while the project is silent. Quitting NS2 and relaunching often fixes it. Sometimes I have to switch off the iPad.

    And no Grinds were present. Yet. Cos grind is indeed awesome... :-)

    I’ve had those hits on project opening since the NS2 update. Bram Bos apps haven’t given me any trouble otherwise though.

  • edited July 2019

    @anickt said:

    @klownshed said:
    One additional warning sign I’ve noticed is when I’m opening a project that has (or will soon get) locking up issues, more often than not I have a Ruismaker Noir track or two.

    When I open the project, a Noir hit gets triggered (double tap the project to load it and ‘Boom’ goes Noir!). Sometimes after that I lose all audio and if I go to a channel with a Noir instance, there’s a ‘loading UI’ message which just spins. All the while the project is silent. Quitting NS2 and relaunching often fixes it. Sometimes I have to switch off the iPad.

    And no Grinds were present. Yet. Cos grind is indeed awesome... :-)

    I’ve had those hits on project opening since the NS2 update. Bram Bos apps haven’t given me any trouble otherwise though.

    If I open and close way too many projects, when I open the one with the Noir boom, it will crash NS2.

    But I’m not suggesting that Noir is causing the crash, just that the project that crashed also makes Noir make a sound as it loads.

  • edited July 2019

    @klownshed
    I guess all we can do is report what we see, the steps to replicate if possible, and send in crash reports where applicable.

  • edited July 2019

    Talking of crashing, I was testing the project and all seemed to be working. I actually added some parts and went to save and NS crashed hard, causing the iPad itself to totally crash and reboot itself.

    I do not like it when an app crashes during saving, losing everything since the last save. After the iPad restarted i launched Ns again and it crashed again. Thinking about it I don’t actually like having to save at all on the iPad other than to make copies.

    Anyway, I relaunched NS2. Again. Now the files in the project load screen don’t display any metadata. No icon, no dates, no list of auto saves, etc.

    Is there a prize for the person who manages to make NS2 crash the most because NS2 is verging on the unusable for me. I have deleted way more projects than I still have as they caused issues or wouldn’t load. I’ve reinstalled NS2 more than once, including throwing away all the projects and starting fresh.

    I’ve checked the logs and there aren’t any crash logs for plugins at the time NS2 crashed. There was a grind plug in in the project but it’s essential to one of the sounds I was using. It’s what the whole thing is based around. I’d rather give up on NS2 than Grind for this tune. And there are some crash logs for grind. But not this time.

    There is a crash log for NS2.

    I am getting totally fed up with NS 2. Sorry, but I send more time troubleshooting with it than making music. I’m very close to giving up.

  • @klownshed in all your projects, are you always using a specific AU in them that might be the culprit?

  • edited July 2019

    .

  • This is hard to indentify when it cannot be reproduced and crashlogs for related plugins are not created .. i was playing for 2 hours with project containing 8 instances of Grind (with various settings) + 8 instances of Eos2 + 8 instances of Replicant - no single crash, all renders rendered at 3.9x - 4.1x realtime speed, i did gazillions of load/change/save/load other project/ back to load grid project again - no single one issue :( It's so stable that i'm thinking that i will start to use Grind in my projects :)))

    my iOS: 12.3.1
    my iPad: 2019 iPad MINI

    Did not run any other app than NS (this is what i do for years on iPad, when i'm working with some app i'm trying to kill all other background apps which i don't need) - propably it can be be related to insufficient memory ? Or to very particular plugin settings ? (what about screenshots of all Grind instances in project, so i can tweak exactly same preset)

    Although - this is interesting - found in iOS > Privacy > Analytics Data 2 logs for EOS 2 and Grind - those were no crashlogs but logs that for long time one instance of each one consumed more than 80% of CPU which is something definitely wrong - maybe on older devices this CAN cause crash, mabye it's just because of on iPad MINI is CPU enough powefull that it handled extreme high CPU demand of those two plugins .. the log looks like this, are you sure you don't see anything like that in your logs ?

  • edited July 2019

    I have had the crashes corroborated by a developer who has reproduced the issue I described. Turns out it wasn’t user error. :-/

    I don’t believe Grind is involved in this particular issue.

    The project that made the iPad reboot itself had an instance of Grind. There wasn’t a “Grind” crash log for the time that it crashed.

    I have seen the cpu logs for Eos 2 and Grind too. These appear to only happen when using them with NanoStudio. I use Both of those plugins a lot in AUM, GarageBand and now AUria Pro so will keep an eye out.

    I can honestly say that Ns2 causes me the most hassle by far. To return to my original post that was reposted here, whatever the cause of the bugs, NanoStudio does not handle the problems elegantly.

    Crashing whilst saving is incredibly frustrating, compounded by the fact that Na2 doesn’t state save in the same way most iOS apps do, requiring the good old fashioned save command. iPad apps shouldn’t have a save command in my very humble opinion. Save as certainly. Just plain save? Nope.

    And finally, I rebooted my iPad and duplicated the problem project in the files app. Because ns2 locks up when doijng a save as.

    Then I removed all traces of grind, then tapped save and yup, you’ve guessed it, NanoStudio locked up.

    Reporting issues with Ns2 publicly reminds me of an old joke:

    I went to the Doctor and Said “Doctor it hurts when I do this!” (Moves Arm)

    Doctor:

    “well don’t do that then.”

    ;-)

    Good old Tommy Cooper for any old Brits around :-)

    Or:

    “Doctor it hurts when I do this!” (Lifts arm)

    Doctor

    “Well my arm doesn’t hurt when I do that, you must be doing it wrong”

    —-

    “Doctor it hurts when I do this!” (Lifts arm)

    Doctor

    “You’re using the wrong arm.”

    :-D

  • edited July 2019

    In grinds defense....I have a shedload of stuff in this song. 65 tracks and a lot of tracks with 10+ fx. It could be anything.

  • edited July 2019

    @drez
    yes.. it's complicated .. it can be anything .. i think it's more about specific conditions, plugin combinations, whatever ..

    @klownshed
    i'm trying just get as many information as possible - every detail can matter .. that's all . that's why i also had e-mail conversation with you while ago ..

    nobody is trying to say you are doing something wrong
    we are thankful for every bug report because every fixed bug makes app better

    We are trying to identify WHAT is wrong ... Devs can fix any issue, usually it needs both side communication of host dev and plugin dev - what we can do is get as much facts as possible to help devs do their job.

    This host/plugin area is very complicated and without enough detailed information it's hard to identify what is needed to be fixed - especially in case of such rare issue like your problem.

    (I give you one example - after MIDI Tools AU plugin pack was released, one of plugins in this pack crashed in NS. Justs in NS. After Matt <-> Blueveek communication it turned out that fix is needed to be done in plugin, and it appeared in NS just because NS did his job (his part of plugin initialisation) far away faster than any other available host - that's why that bug in plugin didn't manifested in other hosts.. Sometimes true reason behind problems is weird and not obvious at first look. Things may be different than they look from our, users, point of view ... )

    Regarding me - everything i wrote in this thread, everything i asked, whole communication with you i had i e-mails is JUST about trying to get as much information as possible. I still don't see any pattern there, i have any clue why you have such fatal issue. I'm happy that @drez had similar issue, my hope was we will move forward with more information, but his issue was solved by changing patch in Grid. So we still don't have 100% reproducible case which is bad.

    I spend today morning 2 hours of my precious time by trying to reproduce issues you are describing. Why do you think i did it ? Because i want to help you. Not convince you that you'e doing something wrong.

    So again, please if you can get us as much facts as you can (ios version, device version, information if you are running more apps when this happens, what buffer size you use - it is same when you change buffer sizes? , list of ALL au plugins in your project (including how many instances of each one is used) link to all crash logs you have, ideally also broken project - you don't need use 'archive' in NS, just copy whole project directory using Apple Files) - then we can move forward... If want to have this fixed (and i really really want), then we need as much facts as possible. As i said - every small thing, at first look not important, can be key to this puzzle ..

  • edited July 2019

    @klownshed said:
    Crashing whilst saving is incredibly frustrating, compounded by the fact that Na2 doesn’t state save in the same way most iOS apps do, requiring the good old fashioned save command. iPad apps shouldn’t have a save command in my very humble opinion. Save as certainly. Just plain save? Nope.

    NS does state save exactly as other apps but that happens in the background. You can access the saved states in the Load Project screen, bottom of the light grey area when you have the project selected. The manual save process is there so you can either commit to the changes you have made or easily revert to the version you had before you started. This is also a good trouble shooting feature.

    If you've lost work and the versions aren't there, that means it's another thing that's gone wrong with NS. But check the versions in case your lost work is still there. FWIW state saving doesn't always save you from lost work, I've lost hours of work in Gadget and Affinity Designer, for example. But it's a clear sign of a catastrophic failure.

    We really do want to help you and we do believe that something's gone very wrong here. I think we also share your frustration because this doesn't seem like an easy problem but cool heads for everyone involved will get to the bottom of it sooner.

  • edited July 2019

    @dendy said:

    @drez
    yes.. it's complicated .. it can be anything .. i think it's more about specific conditions, plugin combinations, whatever ..

    @klownshed
    i'm trying just get as many information as possible - every detail can matter .. that's all . that's why i also had e-mail conversation with you while ago ..

    nobody is trying to say you are doing something wrong
    we are thankful for every bug report because every fixed bug makes app better

    Oh come on @dendy! You know that's not true! ;-) You've been involved in threads where people have gone OTT defensive and even accused me of being a non-NS2-owning-troll... Good imagination from that guy, I bet he's a blast at parties 🎉

    We are trying to identify WHAT is wrong ... Devs can fix any issue, usually it needs both side communication of host dev and plugin dev - what we can do is get as much facts as possible to help devs do their job.

    This host/plugin area is very complicated and without enough detailed information it's hard to identify what is needed to be fixed - especially in case of such rare issue like your problem.

    And I've done quite a bit to help. You know this too. Just because I don't make all of that stuff public doesn't mean I'm not trying to help. And to be fair, I have a job, wife, kids. I don't have the luxury of time for my hobby. Which means any time I spend trying to troubleshoot is time I'm not being creative.

    (I give you one example - after MIDI Tools AU plugin pack was released, one of plugins in this pack crashed in NS. Justs in NS. After Matt <-> Blueveek communication it turned out that fix is needed to be done in plugin, and it appeared in NS just because NS did his job (his part of plugin initialisation) far away faster than any other available host - that's why that bug in plugin didn't manifested in other hosts.. Sometimes true reason behind problems is weird and not obvious at first look. Things may be different than they look from our, users, point of view ... )

    I don't ever recall making any accusations. Stating that something crashes is not making an accusation of why it crashed. But the host has a thankless task. It's the host that crashes. It's the host that loses your work. I never said that it was the hosts' fault that these things happen, but I also think it's reasonable to point out that the way these problems are manifested in NS2 in particular are incredibly frustrating for the end user. And me.

    Regarding me - everything i wrote in this thread, everything i asked, whole communication with you i had i e-mails is JUST about trying to get as much information as possible. I still don't see any pattern there, i have any clue why you have such fatal issue. I'm happy that @drez had similar issue, my hope was we will move forward with more information, but his issue was solved by changing patch in Grid. So we still don't have 100% reproducible case which is bad.

    I have never accused you personally of anything have I? I wouldn't have bothered trying to help and communicating with you in private if I thought you were being anything other than genuine. And besides, I made a joke. With a smiley, It was funny. :-D

    I spend today morning 2 hours of my precious time by trying to reproduce issues you are describing. Why do you think i did it ? Because i want to help you. Not convince you that you'e doing something wrong.

    I have a more than full time job being my own boss. I have a wife and three kids. You don't need to tell me about time being precious! You can imagine how much time I've already spent trying to help with NS2/AU bugs. I've had communications with various people in private about it trying to do the right thing.

    I could easily have held down on the NS2 icon until it wiggled and hit the little 'X'. That would have allowed me to use all the time I've spent trying to reproduce bugs in trying to recreate all the really bad music I've lost due to the crashes and all the really bad music I'd have been able to make had I not been trying to find out exactly what I did to make NS2 fall over. Which would have made me much happier.

    Had I been able to make all that really bad music I am sure that I would definitely have been able to polish into a global number 1 hit. Therefore it is entirely your fault that I'm not a global superstar now. I hope you can live with that! ;-)

    So again, please if you can get us as much facts as you can (ios version, device version, information if you are running more apps when this happens, what buffer size you use - it is same when you change buffer sizes? , list of ALL au plugins in your project (including how many instances of each one is used) link to all crash logs you have, ideally also broken project - you don't need use 'archive' in NS, just copy whole project directory using Apple Files) - then we can move forward... If want to have this fixed (and i really really want), then we need as much facts as possible. As i said - every small thing, at first look not important, can be key to this puzzle ..

    I'll try. But it will mean less time spent making bad music. If you're OK with that... ;-)

    And to confirm, I think at least one of the bugs I've mentioned here is already in hand with the devs.

  • @Stiksi said:

    NS does state save exactly as other apps but that happens in the background. You can access the saved states in the Load Project screen, bottom of the light grey area when you have the project selected. The manual save process is there so you can either commit to the changes you have made or easily revert to the version you had before you started. This is also a good trouble shooting feature.

    In my example described above, there were no autosaves between the time I saved the copy to when it crashed, which was about 15 mins.

    It would be a great troubleshooting feature if saving wasn't one of the primary actions that causes a crash.

  • A bunch of Analytics for your viewing pleasure:

  • edited July 2019

    Thanks for logs ! Hope they will help.

    nobody is trying to say you are doing something wrong
    we are thankful for every bug report because every fixed bug makes app better

    Oh come on @dendy! You know that's not true! ;-) You've been involved in threads where people have gone OTT defensive and even accused me of being a non-NS2-owning-troll..

    Ah ok you mean that discussion on AB forums .. but if i good remember that i was on your side, i don't like when people behave like this ..

    Ok let me correct a bit what i wrote, by "nobody" i meaned us (me and other admins on this forum, or especially Blip Interactive - we all are truly and honestly thankful for every bug report because we all want to have it as stable as possible - if not from other reasons then to save our time spend with doing support for users with issues :))))

    I agree that some users overreact sometimes, but that is someting you cannot avoid in internet disussions... lot of various cultural / social backgorund, language barrier, often people wrongly read beatween lines .. i learned to not take a care too much about this ;)

    I have a wife and three kids.

    Oooh.. i have just one son but that more than enough sometimes :)) Respect man, 3 kids, unimaginable for me :-O

  • @dendy said:
    Thanks for logs ! Hope they will help.

    nobody is trying to say you are doing something wrong
    we are thankful for every bug report because every fixed bug makes app better

    Oh come on @dendy! You know that's not true! ;-) You've been involved in threads where people have gone OTT defensive and even accused me of being a non-NS2-owning-troll..

    Ah ok you mean that discussion on AB forums .. but if i good remember that i was on your side, i don't like when people behave like this ..

    I know, which is why I continued to communicate with you in private (as well as on forums). As I mentioned above, I would certainly not have done had I thought you were like that.

    Ok let me correct a bit what i wrote, by "nobody" i meaned us (me and other admins on this forum, or especially Blip Interactive - we all are truly and honestly thankful for every bug report because we all want to have it as stable as possible - if not from other reasons then to save our time spend with doing support for users with issues :))))

    Hopefully I've demonstrated that I'm happy to help?

    I agree that some users overreact sometimes, but that is someting you cannot avoid in internet disussions... lot of various cultural / social backgorund, language barrier, often people wrongly read beatween lines .. i learned to not take a care too much about this ;)

    I have a wife and three kids.

    Oooh.. i have just one son but that more than enough sometimes :)) Respect man, 3 kids, unimaginable for me :-O

    Three is twice as hard as two. And two is three times harder than one. I've done the maths.

  • @klownshed said:

    @dendy said:
    Thanks for logs ! Hope they will help.

    nobody is trying to say you are doing something wrong
    we are thankful for every bug report because every fixed bug makes app better

    Oh come on @dendy! You know that's not true! ;-) You've been involved in threads where people have gone OTT defensive and even accused me of being a non-NS2-owning-troll..

    Ah ok you mean that discussion on AB forums .. but if i good remember that i was on your side, i don't like when people behave like this ..

    I know, which is why I continued to communicate with you in private (as well as on forums). As I mentioned above, I would certainly not have done had I thought you were like that.

    Ok let me correct a bit what i wrote, by "nobody" i meaned us (me and other admins on this forum, or especially Blip Interactive - we all are truly and honestly thankful for every bug report because we all want to have it as stable as possible - if not from other reasons then to save our time spend with doing support for users with issues :))))

    Hopefully I've demonstrated that I'm happy to help?

    I agree that some users overreact sometimes, but that is someting you cannot avoid in internet disussions... lot of various cultural / social backgorund, language barrier, often people wrongly read beatween lines .. i learned to not take a care too much about this ;)

    I have a wife and three kids.

    Oooh.. i have just one son but that more than enough sometimes :)) Respect man, 3 kids, unimaginable for me :-O

    Three is twice as hard as two. And two is three times harder than one. I've done the maths.

    I have four kids and no wife. My NS2 never crashes. I think I’ve found the problem... :#

  • I have four kids and no wife.

    Jaws. On. Floor.
    You're my personal superhero.

  • I have a hot and heavy song that relies on Magic Deatheye, Pro-R and other AUs . I’m getting the audio cpu hitting at 60%+at times😱
    What to do? Levels for each track are good. I listened to four instruments at a time in solo mode and then another group of instruments in solo mode and no clipping or problems but when everything is going at once I get problems. My latency is set at the highest setting. No way to tame this cpu beast. Maybe I have to many AUs going lol

  • As I wrote, it is important that the project file does not get "damaged" and that a project can even be loaded when an AU makes problems.

    This is something that needs to be enhanced in NS2....
    We can never be sure that all AU will behave well.

  • tjatja
    edited July 2019

    @Arpseechord This is not the right topic for your AU CPU problem.

  • @tja said:
    @Arpseechord This is not the right topic for your AU CPU problem.

    Ok sorry

  • edited July 2019

    I have four kids and no wife. My NS2 never crashes. I think I’ve found the problem... :#

    Jesus christ, man, respect! I hope you get a lot of help from those close to you. I’m barely getting enough work done with the one.

    @tja said:
    As I wrote, it is important that the project file does not get "damaged" and that a project can even be loaded when an AU makes problems.

    This is something that needs to be enhanced in NS2....
    We can never be sure that all AU will behave well.

    Yes, NS is supposed to do just that. When an AU crashes, it should be detected by the system and the next time you load the project, it should ask you if you want to load the crashed AU. It has worked for me, so it’s not completely broken but this means that somehow these issues are managing to bypass a whole lot of safeguards.

    @klownshed I think I can speak for the whole beta team, we definitely appreciate the work you’ve done to troubleshoot this, it’s not an easy undertaking as we all know. So thank you. Sorry for not catching this ourselves.

  • Things are getting weirder.

    As @drez reported that Gribd worked if he changed the preset I thought I’d try the same.

    I’ve had a hell of a time with it.

    I managed to get the project loaded and deleted the instance of Grind.

    I then duplicated the project via the files app and opened this Grind-less project.

    It took aaaaaaages to load.

    Anyway load it did. I put the Grinds back in and played around for awhile.

    Then things got weird. The ui suddenly got extremely slow. I would tap a button and nothing would happen for minutes. Yes minutes. But the weird thing is I couldn’t quit the app via the home button. The whole thing locked up. I couldn’t even lock the screen with the physical lock button.

    The iPad was totally locked up.

    I gave it a couple of minutes but nothing happened so I reset the iPad with lock+home button. This worked.

    In the meantime, my battery had almost completely drained in a very short time, from about 25%.

    I had a few seconds before the iPad shut down and looked at the analytics list. There didn’t appear to be a crash log related to NanoStudio or any of the plug ins I was using.

    There was something along the lines of a force reset log.

    Once the iPad is charged again I will try and find out if the project will open at all.

    If somebody needs the project to send to devs please DM me an email and I’ll send it to you.

  • edited July 2019

    this is not weird, i had same experience with AudioKit D1 synth yesterday, and not just in NS but also in Cubasis - it started eat all CPU cores to the level where all UI srted to be totally unresponsible ...

    if you leave it too long in that stage, it can drain battery very quickly because simply all CPU cores are runnimg to the max.

    Any chance there is D1 synth in your project too ?

  • No I don’t have D1

  • edited July 2019

    ok, please send me your broken project(s), i will play with them, you have my e-mail address probably ;) thanks

  • Maybe one part of the solution in these kind of problems for NS2 is an AUv3 checklist in the settings similar to ‘logic pro’s’ where u can enable/disable any individual AU and root out the problem.

    I can’t speak to the save and crash issues etc etc, however, so I won’t. Just my .02

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