I’ve been having some problems with Rack freezing the entire system leading to a hard power off as the only solution (I think this is related to the realtime option). It happened today just as I was about to record my first fully sequenced track. I had saved many times in the session leading up to the crash but after rebooting my computer the patch will not load and gives the error
JSON parsing error at 1:0 ‘[’ or ‘{’ expected near end of file
And it is an empty file 0kb. The autosave file is just my showing my template so it looks like my song is completely lost.
I’d love to hear if anyone has any ideas about recovering the patch.
I had the same thing happen to me and reported it on Github:
You may want to post there and mention it’s happened to you too. I understand that crashes can/will occur, but I don’t think that should result in lost patches. If VCV Rack keeps the preset open in some kind of edit-state, maybe creating a .tmp file is a better approach so the original preset is never in danger of being corrupted.
Anyway, I was able to recover the prior days’ version of the patch because I use Backblaze to automatically back things up. So I just had to recreate the changes I had made earlier in the day that I lost the patch, which were still fresh in my mind.
I don’t know much about it but isn’t that what autosave.vcv is for? Any kind of solution would be good though, I’ve been making music on linux for many years so I’m not new to crashes but data loss is something else entirely.
Lucky you for being able to recover your work. I posted my patch here reporting a bug with a module but it was very much in the early stages and I have already tried to rebuild previous work on it twice because of similar issues (the crashing bug I thought I had solved when I identified a reproducible crash) so now that I know it can’t be recovered at the file system level I think I will just move on.
I’m thinking of setting up an rsync service that copies my rack folder somewhere else every x minutes so if this happens again there would be some recoverability but I would be concerned that a job like that running every few minutes would cause issues with the audio system/priorities.
What a sad day, that track was the best and most complete thing I have done in Rack and all I needed to do was record it.