#41 Seemingly randomly starts hard crashing on open on mac

[Noah Elder]

OS: macOS 11.6.1
Hardware: M1 mac with 16gb of memory
Usual Use: Streaming to an icecast server, using a command line script to launch butt with separate config files

I have run into this issue twice now, where seemingly at a random time, butt begins crashing on startup. I have tried restarting, reinstalling, and deleting the application state and none of it has worked. The only thing that I have found that fixes it is quite literally migrating to another mac (restoring from an image may also work but I have not done that).

I have attached the entire log from the apple report tool.

[Noah Elder]

Update: I tried my previous fix of migrating to another machine and that did not work this time. I have some suspicions it may be some sort of degradation problem with the m1 macs since the machine I moved back to was the one that had initially shown the problem

[Daniel Nöthen]

Hello Noah,

according to the crash report, the issue is related to the audio backend.
Since version 0.1.30 butt comes with a new version of PortAudio. It would be interesting if the issue also occurs with the older version that uses the previous PortAudio version. You can get it from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/butt/files/butt/butt-0.1.29/butt-0.1.29.dmg/download

Besides that I have a few more questions:
- In the Audio settings of butt, is there "Remember Device by ID" or "Remember Device by Name" selected? I would prefer the latter.
- Does the error also occur if you run butt the normal way? That is running it from the Applications folder with a double click.
- Once the crash happens, does it crash always afterwards, or only sometimes?
- Do you use a audio device with lots of channels?

Best,
Daniel

[Noah Elder]

Ahh interesting, I will give that version a try when I can and let you know.
-I only have ssh access at the moment, but in the config file "dev_remember" is set to 0
-Yeah once it starts happening, I have found no way to get butt to launch, launching normally doesn't work, launching from other accounts doesn't work. However if I do something that causes butt to immediately throw an error butt will give me the error instead of hard crashing (like having no audio device to connect to).
-Yes we use a Tascam 24 mixer as the input device

[Noah Elder]

Update:
-Reverting to version 1.29 did the trick, once I installed that everything worked just fine.
-I also did some testing with the current version while I was in there. It was a result of trying to use the Tascam Model 24. When I switched over to a Focusrite Scarlet Si2 it would launch fine, but as soon as I tried to change the audio device to the Tascam it immediately crashed again

Let me know if you need any more info, I can always reinstall the latest version and gather information

[Daniel Nöthen]

Thank you for testing, Noah. I will have a look at it. It is probably related to the many channels the Tascam offers. Can you send me a short mail to butt at danielnoethen.de so I can send you a test version as soon as I think I have a fix?