Muse2 is unusable in the latest Ubuntu 12.04alpha

I see discussion on the developer's list about this, which unless I'm mistaken, is not a public mailing list, so I'll add this comment here:

You don't have to install Ubuntu on your hard drive to reproduce the bug, you can run it as a live CD. In fact, I'd say the live CD would be also be preferable to a VM, as I've not ever had a good experience getting the whole jackd/ALSA stack to run properly in a VM.

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi Jeff,
The mailinglist is archived publicly https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=lmuse-developer, but you are right I was going to report back here in the bug.
We'll try to reproduce first by installing this iso in a virtual machine. I have experience getting jack/alsa running under a virtual machine so it will suffice for the moment.

Are you able to at all access the menues? There is a setting in the gui config to disable Multiple Document Interface, this may improve things.

Hello Spamatica,

No, I can't access the menus long enough to do anything in them. Is there a plain-text config file somewhere that I can edit that setting into? If so, could you please provide instructions for how to do that?

Hi Jeff,

I've been experimenting with 12.04alpha and indeed it works very badly.
Unity seems to be in quite heavy development, in an older version of ubuntu it worked differently (still misbehaving though).
If you haven't done so already I'd appreciate if you could file a similar bug report towards ubuntu. Since it involves their menu magic the problem is at least partially related to their changes. It may be that they can point us in the right direction what needs to be redone on our side too.

One other thing, I found this page:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/6784/is-it-possible-to-make-indicator-appmenu-ignore-a-specific-application
Where a number of ways of manipulating their menu magic is listed, I couldn't get it to work on my test system but maybe I did something wrong and it works better for you.

I have filed a bug with the Ubuntu folks. You can view it here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/938361

I haven't had a chance to try the suggestions in your link, but the command looks wrong to me. I though it should be:

export XYZ="something"

not

env XYZ="something"

My Unity bug was marked as a duplicate of this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/appmenu-qt/+bug/937892

It turns out that the bug is somewhat specific to Qt, as there is one other known Qt app that does the same thing, called "Vym". Apparently, whatever feature of Qt that Muse2 and Vim are using is exceptionally rare, as most other Qt apps seem to work fine. It would still be good if you could provide a workaround, but it looks like this is definitely a Unity bug.

If I may, what would be a good Live CD distro to try Muse2 on? Perhaps OpenSuse, or maybe Kubuntu? I have a project called Libmodsynth that is intended to provide a library of high quality audio DSP modules for developers, as well as usable proof-of-concept DSSI plugins for musicians. I wanted to do some testing of my project's first released DSSI plugin on Muse2 so I could start providing pre-compiled Muse2 binaries as an alternative to the Qtractor binaries I'm currently providing.

i tried it on ubuntu as well, i can reproduce the problem.
as a workaround, you can try this patch: http://home.arcor.de/michael.jung11/muse-unity.patch (sorry, seem to be too stupid to create a file attachment here...)
you either can apply it to the muse2/muse/share directory if you compile muse on your own, or (as root) apply to /wherever/muse/is/installed/to/. (here, it's /usr/local/share/muse-2.0rc2/templates)
this only patches the default.med and MusE.cfg, which means that other templates will still not work. but you can easily apply the default.med-patch to the other templates as well "by hand": only change at the bottom "<no_toplevels>..." into the "<toplevels>..." stuff.
and then never click on "window config -> as subwin" or "-> shares tools and menu", because this will cause breakage again.

my first guess about the problem was that unity cannot handle QMainWindows which are NOT toplevel-windows, but are embedded into others (as children). because then its hard or impossible to distinguish which menu to display (the inner QMainWindow or the outer, "grand-grand-parent"?) but vym seems not to nest QMainWindows, at least not the version i get on debian.

As for your other question about live CD... as far as I know only ubuntu has the latest MusE. Maybe the alpha for Kubuntu has the necessary libraries.
KDE is well known to work with MusE atleast.

Thanks, I was able to get a functional install of Muse2 in Ubuntu 11.10.

Unfortunately, the daily build of 12.04 I tried seemed to be having issues of it's own, I'll wait about a week for the Ubuntu folks to get it sorted out, then I'll try again.

how did you make it work? by not using unity (recommended) or by the patch i posted (not so good, because probably will muse maker harder to be used)

and what's up with 12.04?

Sorry, I'll explain it a little better:

1. I got it to work with the patch. There were 2 windows open, although one of them didn't do much, except providing some of the more useful menus. I guess that's what you are referring to by "harder to use", at the time I had no idea if that was by design or not.

As far as not using Unity, AFAIK the only 2 options now are Unity and Unity2D, since Gnome2 is gone, and Gnome3 isn't provided by Ubuntu. I haven't tried it with Unity2D, but I'm pretty sure it will exhibit the same behaviour.

2. The daily build I downloaded was having issues. Nothing to do with Muse2, I couldn't even get as far as compiling and installing the patched version of Muse2. It happens all the time with Ubuntu pre-release daily builds, some days they're fine, some days they're useless. I'll give it another go this weekend.

yeah, this "two windows open" is the "harder to use" i meant.
usually, the arranger window (which has a "functions menu") is INSIDE the main window (which has the "global config" menus), sharing one menu bar. but this breaks unity ;(

you could try XFCE4, i really like that one. it's a lightweight and yet pretty powerful desktop environment, offering everything i need (but that might be different from what you need, dunno)

possibly (but i dunno) you can use xfce4's _windowmanager_ (or any else; openbox, metacity, kwin, awesome, twm (xD), icewm, fwm, there are so many). just type openbox --replace into a console and it could work again (not tried however; the unity DE might break without unity's WM; it might have no effect at all as well)

or you'd use KDE. i personally find it too overloaded, but it's a great DE for people who really use it.

2. you could just compile muse2 on your own. you need some -dev libraries and svn. compiling will need some time on the beginning, but from then most builds will go faster, as few files have changes. (sometimes, however, you need to rebuild almost whole muse)

I did get the 12.04 alpha Live CD working by compiling with the patch as well.

1. As far as XFCE4, KDE etc... that doesn't do me much good. I have my own Linux audio project here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/libmodsynth/

, which currently only officially supports Ubuntu and it's derivatives. I may start using Muse2 for my own music, but my primary interest was to provide pre-compiled Muse2 packages for my users(who mostly use Ubuntu), as a host for my project's DSSI plugins.

2. I've been compiling on my own. Here are some instructions for compiling on Ubuntu, for the benefit of any other users who encountered the same issue as me, and stumble upon this bug report:

sudo apt-get install -y liblo-dev dssi-dev ladspa-sdk libasound2-dev g++ qjackctl qt4-designer libjack-jackd2-dev libsndfile1-dev libsamplerate0-dev libtool autoconf libsm-dev uuid-dev cmake liblscp-dev checkinstall libmad0-dev subversion

sudo usermod -g audio $USER

svn co https://lmuse.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lmuse/trunk lmuse

#Apply that patch to ./lmuse/muse2/share/templates/ default.med and MusE.cfg .
#It doesn't apply cleanly, so some editing in gedit is necessary

cd lmuse/muse2

sh ./compile_muse.sh

#wait 5 minutes or so

cd build

sudo make install

officially worked-around.
i added the "-u" command line option, which enables the workaround for the problem. it basically works like the patch, just that you don't need to manipulate templates, and that you cannot accidentially break it by clicking window config -> as subwin.
we'll see if we can fix the problem, but at least muse should be usable again.

(in case an ubuntu dev reads this: do NOT make -u default, as everything except unity works fine, and the -u option makes muse harder to use.)

Great news, gentlemen... The Ubuntu developers have fixed Unity, the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 release due out later this month will not require the workaround, I just tested it with the latest 12.04 live DVD.

You can probably remove that -u option if you feel comfortable doing so... Unless you'd rather leave it in there for people that can't upgrade to the latest Ubuntu for one reason or another, etc...

Sounds great! We'll probably leave the fix in there for a while yet.
Thanks for verifying!