Heya. I have a song that crashes renoise 3.3.2 on linux alsa and jack. Just load it, hit play and let it loop, and after a while it crashes renoise. Maximum 2-3 minutes play time, but for me until now it has always crashed after an unknown time, sometimes right after loading, sometimes later…
Please do not shoot me, I know it is the most stupid way to do sound synthesis in renoise. But I have many other projects, where I use the formula device normally, and they once in a while also crash the same way. Just this experimentation triggers the crashes reliably, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to report it as a bug. Also maybe someone likes and go lul. Is eeezy, n4tive fM sYNtH3s1z, bR0…
I played it back in loop for about 10 minutes but didn’t experience crashes, using Windows 10. Really heavy on CPU though so had to disable overload prevention
And yes, it needs a strong cpu I guess. For me on a i7 laptop it never goes above 50% cpu though. If I mess with BPM/LPB/TPL to achieve a higher tick rate, it takes more cpu of course and will crash even faster…
The cpu thing is another bug though I believe, because the cpu load is caused by meta devices, and renoise seems to only poorly be able to handle it. If I up the tickrate massively, it will climb until 90%, then state the engine has reset, and restart at 0% climbing again.
Here is the log of Song1 crashing my copy of renoise a few times in a row. Sometimes it seems only the audio engine is going down, and renoise is still responsive though cannot do sound and also cannot reinitialize audio. One time it was frozen while unsuccessfully saving crash backup, and I had to “killall -9” to terminate renoise.
Interesting to see it will not crash on windows, others reported no crash on windows, somebody else on linux reported a crash. I run on linux - and I see in the crashlogs, that the failure is sometimes happening in a system library. So either the system library has a bug, or renoise is feeding it corrupt data that it was not designed to handle.
Sometimes it also runs for minutes, before it will crash. Or it will just run, but as soon as I try to close renoise it will instantly crash instead of doing controlled shutdown.
I disabled all the tools in the tool browser, and had a few sessions where it did not crash right away, but ran for some time. I tried some sessions, it often still crashed, also sometimes like after some seconds of playback.
Wow, it does not crash on macos, but seems to indicate some weird performance problem with the macos renoise version: It audio stutters all the time, no matter what the audio buffer size is. CPU meter shows around 75%. System is Core i7 4770, 4 cores.
Same on my MBP late 2013 4 core i7 using High Sierra… Does anybody has a tip for me why this is audio-stuttering on my machine? Don’t have performance problems elsewhere. Maybe Mojave has some bugfixes or so (still on High Sierra)?
As I said, I run linux and from other reports it seems that my file will only crash on linux, not on win or mac…
The stuttering etc… unless you have a strong cpu and realtime system, the song will put high strain on the cpu. It runs at lpb 128, so very fast tick rate, and the sound is produced by audio rate modulation via formula devices. It seems the renoise parameter modulation system is not as nice and stable as the audio system.
I also have linux and peppermint OS + liquorix kernel + threadiqrs on grub and rtprio 99 on audio.conf has made a huge difference, not sure if that is your case due to the lpb, may be also a graphics issue?
Been having the crashes since I use renoise on some projects…on 3 different machines with different graphics drivers. Only on some projects, and very seldom, could never reproduce…
I think it must have something to do with the lua under the hood. I use the formula device a lot. In this track I went nuts with it, and it crashes reliably, so I thought it would be a good idea to report it.
So I conclude OopsFlys example song shows a problem with PDC: Once the PDC is enabled, there is heavy audio stuttering (on my machine), once it is disabled, it plays almost normal. My questions to @taktik would be:
What does utilize PDC here? I guess the formula device?
