Bugs and requests for KXStudio 14.04

[danboid]

Hi all

I couldn't see a dedicated thread for bug reports and suggestions for tweaks and packages for the new KXStudio distro so I thought I'd start one.

I've got a few suggested tweaks for video playback.

With the older VLC under 12.04, you could play multiple video files (in separate VLC windows) OOTB. Now however you need to go to Tools -> Prefs -> Show All Settings -> Playlist and untick 'Use only one instance when started from file manager'. It took me a bit of digging to discover that so I'd like to see that disabled by default.

This brings me nicely onto my next suggestion. Is there any reason why smplayer is the default video playback app under KXS? Maybe its just by chance that its that way? If its not too much trouble I'd like to see VLC as the default for video playback for 3 reasons:

* The standard VLC already included with KX has support for VAAPI hardware accel. video decoding. You need a special vaapi-enabled build of mplayer to get this working under smplayer.

* VLC can play more than one video at a time. As far as I can see, smplayer cannot do this.

* VLC is one of the most downloaded, popular apps of all time on all platforms so most people know how to use it already.

I think gxtuner would make a nice addition as I don't think KX currently includes an app for tuning instruments, does it?

[danboid]

I think mhwaveedit is worthy of inclusion too.

[bazsound]

gxtuner is included with guitarixx as far as im aware.

though it crashes ardour. running it in guitarix though works fine

[danboid]

I prefer mh's interface, its more lightweight than audacity plus it has better JACK support than Audacity. mhwaveedit is what I use if doing non-multitrack recording and I don't need most of the extra features Audacity offers most of the time.

Sound editing is something most KX users are interested in so I think it justifies the extra 400k it will add to the DVD.

EDITED to put best reasons for inclusion first

[danboid]

bazsound:

I know gxtuner, like guitarix, is made by brummer and KX 14.04b already incudes the guitarix plugins but it doesn't include gxtuner currently as its packaged separately. I'm glad to hear F is up for including it as it'll be useful to many KX users.

[danboid]

F:

Did you get my screenshot of the hard-to-read installer partitioning text?

[danboid]

Sounds good to me F!

Yes, sunvox does seem a little out of place now the other non-FLOSS apps have gone.

Why protrekkr over Milkytracker?

How do you build your Mac binaries? I didn't think you owned a Mac Have you set up a Hackintosh?

Any comment on the Cadence / ALSA bridge bug?

[tangerine]

Hi, I'm new to KXStudio, but I already have it installed on 2 computers as it seems to fit my needs of making network jack setup easy.
My main goal is to distribute plugin processing between 3 computers, while running DAW on one of them (which is on Windows).

I'm looking for a way to make permanent or easy to restore Jack setups which would just provide the same in-s and out-s to my main machine across my different projects. So any advice would be appreciated.

Now to the main point of this post, I'm using some windows VSTs, and I'm glad to report that since the latest updates to Carla, for the first time I have DMG Equilibrium successfully running on Linux without fst (festige).

However it won't run when I have the UI bridges enabled, or when I check the "Run plugins in bridge mode when possible" option. So I guess it's a bug.
When trying to load the plugin with any of these 2 options enabled, Carla shows the "Failed to load plugin" error window, saying "Timeout while waiting for a response from plugin-bridge (or the plugin crashed on initialization?)".

Moreover, when trying to run Carla from the Konsole, it won't load the plugin at all, with overall different behaviour.

With no bridging options enabled, it will try to load the plugin, but then it would disable it and refuse to enable it again, with something like this flooding the console output:

Code: Select all

........................
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtTwaitForServer() timeout here
hread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CaCarla assertion failure: "! fTimedOut" in file BridgePlugin.cpp, line 2144
rlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThreaCarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtDeactivate
d::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
.............................

When trying the GUI bridging, for the first time Carla crashed with a segfault, the second time it behaved similarly to no UI bridging, again flooding the Konsole:

Code: Select all

..............
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtSetBufferSize
CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtActivate
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull

..................

CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgwaitForServer() timeout here
eRtThread::run() - Carla assertion failure: "! fTimedOut" in file BridgePlugin.cpp, line 2144
got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNullCarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtDeactivate

CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
...................

with "Run plugins in Bridge mode when possible" enabled, it yet does the same, flooding the console with similar messages:

Code: Select all

......................
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtSetBufferSize
CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtActivate
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
........................................
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtwaitForServer() timeout here
Thread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThreaCarla assertion failure: "! fTimedOut" in file BridgePlugin.cpp, line 2144
d::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtDeactivate
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull

I was amazed by having such a different behavior of the same application running with and without the Konsole, so I went ahead and reproduced it several times in each setting, and also confirmed the fact I'm running the same version of Carla in both cases - 1.9.4 (2.0-beta2)

Thanks for your amazing work!

[tangerine]

Oh, and one another thing: I was quite surprised KXstudio 14.04 comes with jack1 and not jack2 pre-installed.
To have jack on my linux slaves communicate correctly with my Windows machine, I needed jack_control, and it took me quite some time to understand why jack_control is not existent, and that's because it's jack2-only, which is not installed. A bit confusing.

So my request would be to have jack2 instead of jack1 pre-installed, and additionally to have the networking config available through Cadence GUI.
In the meanwhile, I think it would be useful to state clearly on the site that KXstudio has jack1, and to point new users to jack2 and jack_control as a way to customize jack networking. It took me quite some time and effort to figure all this stuff out, as most guides locatable by Google refer to jack1 without stating it clearly.

[tangerine]

ok, where to start...

jack1 missing jack_control is my fault.
I updated the jackdbus patch for it manually and forgot the jack_control script. A future update will bring it back.

Sorry, I thought that jack_control was a feature of jack2.

KXStudio ISO will keep using jack1, not jack2.
jack2 does not have meta-data and in my experience is not as robust as jack1 (specially for firewire).
you can install jack2 if needed.

I'll need to look into the meta-data thing, but anyway I'd been getting some errors with jack1, which stopped to happen with jack2. I'm quite new to the whole jack concept, but as far as I'd been able to understand, jack2's networking is more robust.

about cadence network options, it will take time (if it ever gets done).
it's not something I ever needed to use, and not that much requested.

Fair enough.

for carla + win vst, make sure you have all the latest updates.
you don't need to enable forced-plugin bridges in the carla options since win32 stuff needs bridging to actually work. that option is only for running native plugins as bridges.
"Timeout while waiting for a response from plugin-bridge" might happen if you have a slow pc and can't load in plugin in less than 10 secs.
I'll increase the timeout value, update coming soon.

Indeed, the latest update to Carla fixed the "timeout" problem. I think the HDD in that machine is too slow.
Otherwise, the system on both of my KXstudio machines is fully up to date.

Yet, also after the update, Carla still exhibits the same behavior and same output when run from the console, which is quite a mystery for me. Also when run directly (not from the console), it does manage to load the plugin, but it uses about 45% of the available DSP power on my first machine (Pentium Dual-Core CPU T4500) and about 65% on my second machine (Core2Duo T7400). That's with 1 Equilibrium plugin which basically is doing nothing with the signal. The same plugin with same preset consumes about 5% of the DSP power when run on Ardour through abique's vst-bridge on both of my machines.

In case you're interested, I captured the onset of the console flood (had to kill Carla very quickly to preserve the onset in the Konsole's buffer):

Code: Select all

Using "carla" theme
Carla 1.9.4 (2.0-beta2) started, status:
  Python version: 3.4.0
  Qt version:     4.8.6
  PyQt version:   4.10.4
  Binary dir:     /usr/lib/carla
  Resources dir:  /usr/share/carla/resources
libjack.so.0 loaded sucessfully!
Carla Server Info:
  sizeof(BridgeRtData):    4244
  sizeof(BridgeNonRtData): 16400
starting app..
WINE realtime scheduling hack enabled, realtime base priority has been set to 15
wineserver running SCHED_NORMAL
libjack.so.0 loaded sucessfully!
CarlaEngineBridge::CarlaEngineBridge("R2moEb", "Q3dJpB", "XqEQGx")
Carla assertion failure: "shmRtDataSize == sizeof(BridgeRtData)" in file ../backend/engine/CarlaEngineBridge.cpp, line 298, v1 4244, v2 4248                                                                                                                      
Carla Client Info:
  BufferSize: 2048
  SampleRate: 48000
  sizeof(BridgeRtData):    4244/4248
  sizeof(BridgeNonRtData): 16400/16400
Carla assertion failure: "count <= pData->engine->getOptions().maxParameters" in file BridgePlugin.cpp, line 1539, v1 200, v2 200
CarlaPlugin::updateOscData(0xa7607e8, "osc.udp://len-3000-C200:15005/plug-4608")
CarlaPlugin::updateOscData() - source: host "127.0.0.1", port "15005"
CarlaPlugin::updateOscData() - target: host "len-3000-C200", port "15005", path "/plug-4608"
CarlaPlugin::updateOscData() - done
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode^CwaitForServer() timeout here
: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run(CarlaEngineBridge::handleNonRtData() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeNonRtSetBufferSize
) - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
CarlaEngineBridgeRtThread::run() - got opcode: kPluginBridgeRtNull
..........................

Thanks!

[tangerine]

And another WinVST-related bug in Carla: it doesn't work reliably with the same Equilibrium plugin [Edit: wrapped inside the abique's vst-bridge]. First time I tried to load it, Carla crashed with a segfault. Second time it flooded the console with the following message:

Code: Select all

Carla assertion failure: "pData->enabled" in file VstPlugin.cpp, line 1797

And another line in the middle of the flood:

Code: Select all

[CRIT] P: [0xb755c700] !!!!!!!!!! UNHANDLED effect_dispatcher(effSetBlockSizeAndSampleRate, 0, 2048, (nil), 0.000000)

Perhaps there were other messages, but the flood pushed them out from the console buffer.
The plugin looks like it loaded despite these messages, but it failed to show the GUI, saying in the console:

Code: Select all

fixme:ole:RemUnknown_QueryInterface No interface for iid {00000019-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
fixme:x11drv:X11DRV_DestroyNotify window 0x2003c/4e00001 destroyed from the outside

Which comes of course from wine. However it seems wine is not to blame here, as the same plugin with the same wrapper runs fine in Ardour and shows the GUI just fine.

I tried to load the plugin on Carla a couple more times with the bridged gui disabled, but that only produced segfaults at plugin load attempt:

Code: Select all

Using "carla" theme
Carla 1.9.4 (2.0-beta2) started, status:
  Python version: 3.4.0
  Qt version:     4.8.6
  PyQt version:   4.10.4
  Binary dir:     /usr/lib/carla
  Resources dir:  /usr/share/carla/resources
libjack.so.0 loaded sucessfully!
WINE realtime scheduling hack enabled, realtime base priority has been set to 15
wineserver running SCHED_NORMAL
Segmentation fault

[tangerine]

your carla bridges don't seem correct.
all those "kPluginBridgeRtNull" messages should be kPluginBridgeNonRtPing and never printed to console.
so you're using a bridge that doesn't match the carla version and errors will occur. not sure what's going on there...

this error:

Code: Select all

Carla assertion failure: "shmRtDataSize == sizeof(BridgeRtData)" in file ../backend/engine/CarlaEngineBridge.cpp, line 298, v1 4244, v2 4248 

is critical, no win32/64 bridges will work correctly until that is resolved.

Well, it's a fairly fresh install of KXstudio 14.04. It came without the win- and wine- bridges installed, so I apt-get installed them. I didn't mingle much with the repositories. I didn't install the 64-bit bridges as I don't need them.

Code: Select all

dpkg -l | grep carla
ii  carla-bridge-win32                                          1.9.4+git20140802.3                             i386         carla win32 bridge
ii  carla-bridge-wine32                                         1.9.4+git20140802                               i386         carla win32 bridge (wine DLL)
ii  carla-data                                                  1.9.0+git20140804                               all          Carla shared data
ii  carla-git                                                   1.9.0+git20140804                               i386         audio plugin host
ii  carla-plugins-lv2                                           1.9.0+git20140804                               i386         Carla internal plugins in LV2 format

[tangerine]

Just to update this thread, there was a bug in 32-bit versions of bridges, now solved:
http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php ... 240#p55071

[tatch]

about cadence network options, it will take time (if it ever gets done).
it's not something I ever needed to use, and not that much requested.

what would be in the cadence network options? would this just provide a gui for jack_netsource?

[tangerine]

Took a look at zita-njbridge, seems like a jack2 Netadapter reimplementation. Not sure what's the difference and why the need to reimplement. Jack2 provides a modular toolset by design, and Netadapter is a relatively small portion of this toolset, not necessarily initialized for jack network communication. In fact, netadapter is notably unsuitable for professional-grade audio processing such as mixing, as it necessarily involves resampling in the signal path [Edit: I think there is an option to disable resampling, but then you need to have all the audio interfaces in your setup synchronized]. As it looks from the feature list of zita-njbridge, this is also the case with it.
To avoid resampling in the signal path with jack, one needs to create a master-slave(s) configuration, with the master running jackd+netmanager and slave(s) running netjack or netjack2 instead of the conventional audio driver. This does not involve netadapter (and perhaps this wouldn't involve zita-njbridge either). A handy walkthrough with pictures of netjack2 can be found here:
http://trac.jackaudio.org/wiki/WalkThro ... r/NetJack2

It might be a bit outdated, as I see it points to the SVN and not to github, where jack development is currently happening.
Disclaimer: I might be completely wrong, as I am by no means an expert on jack.