start blank unresponsive screen (Linux x86)

[forestcreature]

hiya,

a few days ago sunvox 1.9.2 crashed. it was during a songwriting session with somebody, so i can't remember exactly what happened. i think that i had been changing between jack and alsa output, or vice versa

since then i have not been able to start sunvox properly again. i have tried to start 1.9.1, with the same effect. console output looks normal, as does the log under /tmp. a window is launched that is black and unresponsive. i removed ~/.config/SunVox, and the sunvox clipboard files, to no apparent effect

x86 linux 4.4.14 with ratpoison window manager (never had a similar problem before, with this setup; sunvox had been running quite well for weeks, albeit with more hangs as documented elsewhere, e.g. when opening module without stopping currently playing module)

i'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting. would it be possible to have a debugging version please?

looking forward to your ideas! i became quite reliant on sunvox

bests,
Jason

[NightRadio]

Please try to launch SunVox from Terminal using the following command:
./sunvox clearall
This will reset all the settings

[forestcreature]

thank you

i ran with the clearall argument and got the attached log output (black window opened and closed immediately). after running clearall and starting sunvox again, the previously described problem persists: blank window

edit: no evidence of segfault

[NightRadio]

Ok, thanks. Now please launch SunVox from Terminal and send me its text output (it is almost the same as sunvox_log.txt, but with some additional details sometimes).

[forestcreature]

sorry for the delay

for some reason stdout and stderr redirection to file didn't work, just for sunvox, so here's the terminal output

[NightRadio]

hm... may be something wrong with the pulse audio.
Please try put this config file to the /home/user/.config/SunVox/ directory

[forestcreature]

wow, it worked! thank you!

i am really sorry that you had to spend time on this, since it's not your fault at all, and not a fault of sunvox

Slackware changed to pulse audio as default in this version, 14.2, which is understandably unpopular with some people---it is hard to get rid of, once a system is built around it. i uninstalled pa, and thought that i reconfigured back to a state of using only ALSA and jack

i'm really sorry that this didn't occur to me (i thought i was rid of pa). still not sure exactly what happened, but this works

[NightRadio]

since it's not your fault at all, and not a fault of sunvox

Great! :)
Honestly i don't like PulseAudio too... I prefer pure ALSA

[forestcreature]

haha it happened again, so again i used the .ini file which you supplied. however the difference between this file (with which i get a working sunvox window), and the existing .ini file (-> blank black sunvox window) is that the latter file has a 3rd line for the builtin_theme XY that i selected. otherwise (i.e. in terms of audiodevice and audiodriver) they are identical

huh?

[NightRadio]

Hm... So it happens randomly?
Or if you return the line "builtin_theme XY" back to the config - you will get the black screen 100%? If so - please send your current "bad" config to me.

[forestcreature]

i don't see an obvious pattern. currently sunvox starts fine with an .ini file that includes builtin_theme and other selected options. so i would probably leave it now unless something systematic happens

EDIT: replicated on another computer (Slackware 14.2 again, this time 64bit). now i'm fairly sure it happens like this: set sunvox to use ALSA, start jackd, start sunvox = fails to start. i think that something special is happening on these two systems because everything was compiled to use pulseaudio, and pulseaudio was removed. i've avoided learning anything about pulseaudio because i hoped the problem would go away when i took reasonable steps to remove it. but i think that a bunch of things were compiled to work with it, including ALSA (grr), so recompiling everything to do with audio is going on my todo list. but still, maybe sunvox's handling of the situation is a bug? i don't know what it's doing when it hangs in this situation

[forestcreature]

removing pulseaudio emulation for ALSA (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) seems to have solved the starting problem. this installed libpulse* libs for applications that were compiled to require them (like mplayer). i speculate that perhaps sunvox tried to start with pulseaudio driver when it couldn't use ALSA, but maybe libpulse returns strangely or something when the ALSA client can't be created, so it hung. does sunvox have a timeout for non-starting drivers? hope that this is helpful!