Unfortunately, just as I and Aalto were on a such a beautiful way of discovery, I have come to the conclusion that it's the likely perpetrator of recurring crashes.
I've had a longer period of daily crashes in Live 10.0.3 and now continuing in 10.0.4 and the same is true in live 9.7.7. Usually Live goes very long periods before I see a crash and they almost never have occurred while I'm actually making music.
I have removed all other plug-ins, both VST and AU.
I have removed all Factory packs
I have disabled all MIDI ports I don't use
I have reset Live
I have installed a fresh Live 10.0.4
I have updated Aalto to the latest version
What happens is that I use Live as usual with Aalto on one track or more and some native devices. I can do just about anything to induce a crash, like stop playback with the space bar or the Push (a maximum of ten stops and bam!), move the pointer to a menu, move the pointer to the Live browser, use the arrow keys to move to the next chain in a rack, when I load a new device or plug-in from the GUI and so on.
Naturally I expect Live to not crash when I do these and whatever other actions.
What does happen is that Live crashes. Here's a recent crash report when only Aalto is active.
It seems to me — and Ableton support I think — that JuceVSTWrapper in Aalto could be involved in the cause of the crash.
Update: I have now switched to the AU version and there are no ridiculous crashes. I haven't done so much sessions yet, but it's looking hopeful.
It would probably be a good idea if we work together to be able to determine if it is "JuceVSTWrapper" that is behind this problem, so we can notify the developers in question or that you can adjust your usage of this code library/tool (I'm assuming here).
I'm awaiting your response, but as the AU version seems to work for now at least, please use your judgement when to address this (which is what expect). There's hopefully no hurry on my part.
Unfortunately, while some crashes stopped, I got new ones. This one after having added Aalto AU to 2 MIDI tracks and attempting to duplicate one of them.
Crash report Aalto AU
Sorry you are running into problems. These are new to me. I appreciate the detailed reports.
You seem very on top of the latest from Ableton so you probably heard that Live 10.0.3 had some bad bugs with AU parameter updates. You say you are using 10.0.4, and I think these have been fixed in that version. Just FYI.
The VST crash report does not indicate the JuceVSTWrapper is the problem. It does point to some debugging code of my own. I should be able to post a beta very soon that I hope will fix this.
The AU crash you sent later does not point to Aalto. It looks like purely an issue with Live. If you want to experiment you might try the same track copying operation with a different AU instrument plugin.
Randy, thank you for your swift response. Oh, that's good it's something you can address.
If it doesn't take you too much time I'd be delighted to learn which rows points to what source in this case. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with C++ or Objective C, just non-GUI Java. Is it understandable one could assume JUCE components possibly being involved in this case?
I'll try again with another plug-in, but I tested the other actions I mentioned in another set with Obxd (VST) and also the native "Standard" instruments and Live was stable. But too early say anything definitive as these crashes seem to get triggered only about 1 out of 10 times or so.
In the first crash with the VST, you can see at Line 30: Crashed Thread: 5 AudioCalc
So you can scroll down to thread 5, which starts at line 114. The function calls are in order of most to least recent. Each line has the name of the executable module that is running, followed by hopefully the name of the function inside of it. For com.ableton.live you don't usually see function names, just numbers, because the function names have been stripped from the executable.
Roughly speaking, thread 5 tells you that the crash was in the kernel library, called by the C ++ standard library, called by Aalto, called by Ableton Live. My own code is trying to print some debug information, which it shouldn't be doing in a release build for various reasons, one of which being that the string library might allocate memory as we see here. Allocating memory in an audio processing thread is always something to avoid. Even so, it should not be crashing, so I will look to see what is causing the crash before simply removing the debug printing.
Great! Thanks!
Let me know if you want me to test anything.
Just a quick update to let you know I downgraded to version 1.8.2 and neither of the VST or AU cause these crashes now. Which is great as I don't have to replace Aalto in my projects.
OK thanks for the info, I'll be in touch here about a plugin update.
I just uploaded a beta installer for Aalto MacOS. Please give it a try: http://madronalabs.com/media/aalto/Aalto1.8.4b1.pkg
Thanks randy. I'll test this in the coming days.
Initial sessions with 1.8.4b1 indicates the insidious crashes are now history. I have encountered some odd things with my CPU dropping its frequency, but I believe this to be unrelated to our problem here and it's hopefully fixed now anyway by resetting networking (touching my wooden table).
Thanks for great work! I'm impressed.
I'll let you know if the issue reappear.
Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to use the beta as long as you need—it's fully functional, non-expiring, etc. I'll send out an all-plugins update in a bit.
A bump so the beta is more visible. Kaivo and Aalto releases coming soon.