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Are you getting errors with iFretless apps?
iFretless developer here. We have a problem:
We're getting bug reports from customers saying that iFretless apps crash immediately when they attempt to load them as Audio Units.
The trouble is, we have several iPads and iPhones in our office, and these errors aren't happening on any of them. We need to find out what's happening on our customers' iPads that isn't happening when we test the apps.
If you're experiencing an error like this, I would like to know what you have on your iPad that we might not have.
- Do you have an apple Magic Keyboard connected?
- Are you using an external audio interface?
- Are you using any version of iPad OS other than 17.x?
- Are you running any other audio software in the background?
- Is there anything unusual about your sample rate?
- When you load iFretless as an Audio Unit plugin, are you loading a saved project or adding it to a new project?
- What error message are you seeing? Is there anything unusual about the way the name of the plugin is spelled in the error message, for example is the host app calling it "iFretless B" instead of "iFretless Bass"?
Comments
I did have a crash during testing today. Here are my results:
Equipment: iPad Pro M1 2021 model
iPadOS 17.3 (21D50)
USB-C to Headphone adapter from UGreen attached
Scenario 1:
Loaded up iFretless Bass and iFretless Guitar in AUM in a new project as AUv3 in instrument channels
Tested by tapping and using built-in keyboard
No issues after about 5 minutes of use. Repeated a couple more times for several minutes. No issues.
Scenario 2:
Updated both apps to latest version (as of today).
Loaded up iFretless Bass and iFretless Guitar in AUM as a new project as AUv3 in instrument channels
Loaded Cem Olcay's Auto Bass app and routed MIDI to iFretless bass
Generated a couple of basslines and played for a couple minutes. No issues.
Change the velocity level setting in Auto Bass to a lower value (was 90), and hit play - instant crash in iFretless Bass. iFretless Guitar was fine.
Attempted to repro the problem by changing the velocity parameter again, changing other settings, generating new basslines, etc. No issues for several minutes, no issues after reloading the project and trying again a few more times.
The AUM settings are pretty standard. Buffer size of 256, Sample rate 48 Khz. I even tried changing the buffer size to 2048, no crashes. I'll continue testing periodically and report back if there are any further crashes.
@Blue_Mangoo I emailed about this but to put it here too: I found I could reproduce crashing behavior reliably by connecting a (typing, not musical) keyboard. This occurs with a Magic Keyboard or my Bluetooth keyboard. iPadOS 17.3 and version 1.4.32 of iFretless Bass on an M1 iPad Pro (WiFi, 1TB). Prior to 1.4.32 I also got a crash when selecting sample rates other than 48kHz in AUM, but that seems to have resolved with 1.4.32.
Edit: tested AUv3 hosts are Logic Pro for iPad and AUM.
Thanks for engaging with the community!
(m1 iPad Pro with latest iOS). After a reboot, with nothing connected to the iPad, iFretless loads fine as standalone, in AUM, and in Cubasis. Plugging in my USB hub (which then connects to my 3rd Gen Scarlett 4i4, as well as my LaunchPad X and MPK Mini MK3), iFretless crashes immediately in AUM and Cubasis, though it still loads in stand-alone.
What if your launchpad isn’t connected? Someone else mentioned a typing keyboard being implicated. Launchpad X sometimes looks like a typing keyboard?
What sample rate is your Scarlett running at?
@tja @Tovokas @espiegel123 @mjm1138 @EdZAB
Thanks everyone for replying. I was getting so many complaints that I thought perhaps it was broken on every iPad except the ones we have in our office. It's calming to hear that so many people aren't having problems.
So far, it sounds like the only consistent way to reproduce the issue is to connect an Apple Magic Keyboard. So we'll buy one of those and see what happens.
Thanks for your help.
Try quitting AUM (swipe it up in the task manager) and then restarting it with the keyboard attached.
For what it's worth @Blue_Mangoo I don't think you need to buy a Magic Keyboard. The bug surfaces reliably with every keyboard I've tried, either USB or bluetooth. Note that if the plugin is loaded and running, it will keep running normally if you plug in or pair with a keyboard. But when you quit AUM (or just reload the session) the plugin will crash, so it's something that happens on plugin initialization. Unplug the keyboard and the plugin will load right away, no need to restart AUM or reload the session, just reload the plugin.
Thanks. We will buy a cheaper one. Hopefully we get this fixed soon.
I was able to duplicate this with a cheap bluetooth keyboard by Sparin. Connect the keyboard to iPad, launch AUM, open a project with iFretless bass and iFretless Guitar - both plugins crash on load. Reproducible consistently.
Thank you!
@Blue_Mangoo iFretless Bass 1.4.34 fixes the bug for me, thanks for the quick fix! I’m so happy, I bought iFretless Brass too! I’ll probably buy the guitar app soon 🙂
Thanks for the fix: works great now
After fixing the error we still do not understand why.
The process for fixing it was to connect the iPad to the Xcode debugger, which gives us information about which line of code is currently running, then reproduce the error. When the plugin crashes, Xcode shows us which line of code it was on when the crash occurred. On that line of code, it displayed a warning saying something like “this command should not be executed from the main thread.” There was no explanation about why it should be that way. So the developer added two or three more lines of code to run that command on a different thread and then all was good.
The explanation is a bit vague and technical because I don’t understand it well enough to simplify:
When we plugged in a keyboard, the app crashed at a line of code that is responsible for closing the settings menu at startup. XCode displayed a warning on that line of code saying that farther down the call stack from there was another function call that should only be made from the main thread. We shifted the function call out of the thread on which it was sitting by queuing it as a task in the dispatch queue. That fixed the problem.
(Dispatch queue is used to launch tasks that run simultaneously, often on a different processor core. The purpose of it is to do actions that could take some time without blocking the operation of the sequence of commands in a block of code. For example, if you wanted to play a key click sound from inside a typing app but didn’t want that the app stops accepting keyboard input while playing the audio file with the click sound then you could put the play audio file command on the dispatch queue and then return immediately to the block of code that handles keystroke events. The iPad would schedule the sound to play as soon as one of the other processor cores has time to work on it, and the core that processes the flow of commands you were writing related to the keyboard would continue on immediately without pausing to wait for the audio file to finish playing.)
Anyway, for some reason, in iOS 17.2 and above closing the settings menu was doing something that shouldn’t be done on the main thread. Maybe it was the animation of the menu sliding off the side of the screen. And for some reason the iPad can’t listen for events from usb c while it’s doing that action.
Thanks to everyone who helped us identify the cause of this error.