Rosegarden is making me crazy!

[ntnunk]

I've been trying to finish a song for the last couple of days. It's required me to spend quite a few hours with Rosegarden and I'm almost ready to scream in frustration. It's crashing randomly, and if that weren't bad enough it's refusing to save voice configuration information for the tracks so that every time it crashes I have to go back through and reconfigure the sequencer and voice setup for each track. It's caused a job that should have taken a few hours to take me two days so far and I'm still not finished. I just upgraded to Rosegarden 1.7.2 and I think, if anything, it's even worse. I'm having trouble even setting up the voices the first time, much less saving them.

I shouldn't complain because it's free software I suppose. I guess I'm just venting my frustration. I actually like Rosegarden a lot when it's working. It's just proven to be VERY unstable for me. Here's hoping that Ardour3 will be out soon and it's MIDI implementation will make Rosegarden something that I won't have to deal with anymore.

I'll stop ranting now and try to get back to work.

[raboof]

I shouldn't complain because it's free software I suppose.

Blindly complaining, of course, while at times relieving, is never a very useful response . On the other hand, silently `swallowing it' in frustration isn't the way either.

Have you tried getting traces for the crashes and notifying the Rosegarden developers? This page might be helpful, in particular the 'Producing a Stack Trace' section.

Here's hoping that Ardour3 will be out soon and it's MIDI implementation will make Rosegarden something that I won't have to deal with anymore.

Here's hoping the Rosegarden issues will get resolved and we'll have 2 great packages to choose from . Switching to another tool is a solution you can only apply a couple of times, which is why I tend to prefer fixing problems (or helping others fix the problems) as much as possible .

[ntnunk]

Have you tried getting traces for the crashes and notifying the Rosegarden developers?

No, I haven't, and I should. I'm a developer as well, so I definitely know better. I guess the problem with this is two-fold:

• First, I'm not really getting repeatable crashes. Rosegarden's sequencer just seems to crash randomly. Rosegarden itself rarely crashes, but the sequencer crashes frequently. Sometimes it'll run for hours (or days) an not have a problem, sometimes it crashes on startup, and sometimes it seems to crash every 10 minutes.
• Second, when I'm working in Rosegarden I'm usually in "music creation mode" if you know what I mean. I have a hard enough time staying in my creative groove in spite of all the crashes and if I started chasing bugs I'd never get the project finished.

I realize both of these are pretty much just excuses. What I need to do is set aside some time to try and capture the bugs when I'm in developer mode, not musician mode. What I really should do is build a copy of Rosegarden from source, with debug symbols, on my development (instead of my studio) computer and then just trace the damn things down myself and send in patches. Maybe that's a project for next week when I'm home recuperating from surgery.

Switching to another tool is a solution you can only apply a couple of times, which is why I tend to prefer fixing problems (or helping others fix the problems) as much as possible .

True enough, although I have an ulterior motive for hoping Ardour gets a good MIDI implementation. Namely, I'd rather do my MIDI and audio work in the same application. I like having a separate "drum machine" (i.e. Hydrogen) but I'd like to be able to work a little more seamlessly between non-percussion instruments. I always kind of feel that my work flow is suffering when I'm switching back and forth between Ardour and Rosegarden.