I have a win 10 machine at the office where I have VCV R2 installed. I notice on occasion that when I close it out and then re-open it, I get an error message saying something along the lines of: “An instance of VCV is already running, you can’t run 2 instances.” I have to open task manager and scroll down to Background Processes (123) where I’ll find Rack and end task. It’s doing this as I type this out. The CPU usage is sitting around 20% with 1,031.4MB showing in memory, 7.8 MB/s in Disk, and the Power Usage is calling it Very High. When I restart the program after doing this, I get the pop-up that Rack had crashed and do I want to clear it and open a new session - something like that.
Any ideas why this may be occurring?
64 Bit Intel i7-9700 machine with 16GB RAM
I see that behavior with Win 11 occasionally. Seems like there is a crash mode possible where the UI crashes but some other part remains active. To tell the truth, I think I have occasionally seen this type of crash with pretty much every application I use, very rarely. I have given up trying to track these down as they never seem to persist or recur close together.
I’ve also seen it a few times on my Mac, it’s a long time ago though. With these kinds of problems the first step should always be to grab the log file (log.txt) look at it and post it here right after it happens.
That sounds like what I was experiencing with early versions of Low Fat Milk in my patch. I think the LFM issue has been resolved. I think I have had that with another early release of a module, but can’t remember which one.
I have another scenario that can tank VCV on my Macbook Air - If VCV is using headphone output, and then I remove the headphones, then VCV becomes dead. I must close the app and restart. I have remembered to avoid this of late, so I don’t remember all the details.
Yep. But Rack crashes out of the blue are so traumatizing that I normally immediately relaunch Rack to see it if is going to work. Of course the log file is gone if I do that. Each time I kick myself for not grabbing the log file, but it all happens so seldomly that I seem to never learn my lesson.
Yeah, that’s a special Mac case and I know what it is. Apple in their wisdom decided that the plug has dual functionality and they detect of a headphone plug is inserted. If it is then it’s an audio out interface. If it isn’t then suddenly it’s an audio input interface. It’s the weirdest thing and people have complained about it for years. The problem is that Rack reacts pretty badly to an audio interface being removed, if it’s using it, no matter what interface. So unfortunately it’s a case of “don’t do that then”. Close Rack before removing the headphone jack
One way I can consistently reproduce having the need to kill Rack from Task Manager is to turn my Eurorack power off, which disconnects my Expert Sleepers ES-8 from the PC. If I then close Rack it won’t restart. It says there’s another instance running. I’ve just gotten into the habit of closing Rack before turning off my Euroack hardware.
