For the past few days I’ve been playing with a patch I made based on the Moog Subharmonicon. I’ve listened to it for several hours without issue. This morning I went to open the patch and it crashed rack2, and I have been unable to open it since then. I’ve tried opening other patches I’ve made and they work fine, so it seems to be an issue localized to this patch file
I did my best to search through prior posts for fixes before posting, but my log.txt file (see link below) looks different than anything I was able to find. It looks like it errored after loading a font? My apologies if there’s a different process I should go through before creating a topic; I’m hoping to check if I’m missing something obvious before submitting this to vcv support.
Looking at your log it’s a bit strange. Rack starts just fine, loads all plugins just fine, and looks like it’s loading the patch just fine. Starts its window and then crashes with nothing looking wrong. I would try this: Close all your applications. Reboot the computer and then only start Rack and load the patch again. If it keeps crashing write to support.
Have you been doing any “hacking” on your Rack installation?
If a plugin doesn’t crash during initialization, you wouldn’t see anything in the log file. The process() and step() realtime functions are not logged, so you couldn’t tell from the logfile if a plugin crashed there,
I would beg to somewhat differ. It’s true that sometimes the log doesn’t reveal anything about the actual cause, but also, a lot of the time when a specific module is crashy, you’ll see it in the log file.
The crash is in the drawing code, so if those fonts are being loaded in response to the first draw, those log entries might point to the crashing module.
The last module mentioned in those font-load entries was SickoCV - try removing that from the patch (unpack it, edit the JSON to refer to SockoCV to make it an invalid module reference) and see whether it loads. If that’s not something you’re comfortable attempting, post the patch here and I or someone else can do that for you.
This sent me down quite a rabbit hole. I haven’t used terminal in a while, but I managed to install unzstd through homebrew, navigate to my patch in terminal, and unpack it.
I now have a .json file and an empty folder called ‘modules’. I changed every reference to “SickoCV” that I could find to “SockoCV”. Forgive my ignorance, but how do I repackage the json file into a vcv file?
As a (simple) alternative, close rack, you could move the SickoCV folder from the plugins folder to f.i. your desktop, restart rack load the original patch, it will complain that it could not find sickocv but maybe it will start up.
I renamed it to .vcv and it looked like it was going to open fine. It said some modules were missing, which is to be expected since I renamed them in the .json file. Unfortunately it still crashed immediately after that message was displayed.
I was able to recreate most of the patch in a new file earlier today, so this isn’t very urgent anymore, but I appreciate everyone’s help looking into this.
I’m very confused by this, but when I went to go open up the patch this morning to get the new log file to attach here the patch opened fine! What’s even weirder is I went back to the original file that kept crashing (I made a copy of it for troubleshooting) and it opened just fine too! Very very strange, as it is literally unchanged.
I’m attaching the patch here in case any of you are professionally curious. This is the actual patch file that kept crashing on me, and I have no idea why it works now. I’m also attaching the log.txt file from when it opened successfully.
Subject line fits so I’m resurrecting the thread. I have a couple of patches that have been crashing VCV Rack upon load. I’m running Mac Silicon.I have run the system logs through ChatGPT who says it’s a SVG loading failure, first from the MindMeld Mixer, then when I moved it from the plugins folder, it was Plateau, and then when I reinstated it, it was OFSWidget… The VCV log suggests it’s a SVG load error as well (attached). Since the offending module changes ChatGPT suggests there might be something upstream that is corrupting downstream load processes so I want to go through the exercise of removing modules from the JSON file until I can discover what is broken.
What I am asking is how do I do this? I know that VCV files are compressed JSON, so the web search suggestion of simply naming .vcv to .json doesn’t work, but I have also tried decompressing the .vcv file with Peazip and it doesn’t seem to recognise the .vcv file as something it can work with. So I need help with the decompression step please. Thank you!
I doubt it’s related to SVGs, it’s most likely a misbehaving module.
VCV (v2) patches are tar archives compressed into a zstd compressed file, so anything that can open both of those will work. Extracting the .vcv file should give you a file with the patch name and no extension, then extracting that should give you the files for the patch. 7-Zip on Windows can open both, but I don’t know if that’s available on Mac.
You can find the extracted content in autosave in your user folder and edit there. I think this is the easiest approach, because you don’t have to worry about creating a valid vcv file after your edits, just start Rack and it will load it.