Mobius UI Hard Crashing Party

[Philip Clevenger <phil.clevenger@gmail.com>]

Hey Mobius people - and maybe Jeff?

Last night I found myself in a nasty crash cycle with Mobius VST and Ableton that was literally three hours of hair-pulling nightmare.

It began when Ableton crashed hard due to what I think was a failure of my MOTU Traveler’s MIDI system. Bah. Need to upgrade that thing anyway.

After that - When I relaunched Ableton, Mobius’ interface was just gone. I got the Mobius window, with some installed buttons, but all else was gone.

Trying to reconfigure the UI from scratch was brittle and nasty - each time I added something to the UI and exited the dialog, Mobius would crash and take Ableton down with it. This happened again and again, though each time I relaunched, Mobius would seem to retain my changes - so I made some progress in fits and starts this way… until I came to the specifics of the Components UI - the Loop Window item was simply not there! I knew it was there before because I am a heavy user, have many switches pointing to it, and was just placing it onscreen minutes before. Further, I tried to access the Buttons config dialog to check for the Windowing item (it was there!) and when exiting that, I got another crash. Then after relaunching, when I open Mobius, all my hard-won progress was blown away again. Just gone.

Next I did a series of clean reinstalls and experienced more of the same behaviors. Many times during all of this, Ableton would crash at relaunch too.

Then - I started working with the standalone - and found the Windowing option was indeed present there… and that sometimes, changes I made in standalone would propagate back to the VST. Though, not predictably, and not always. And I found the standalone to be crashy as hell too.

SOMEHOW… over time… the missing Windowing feature *reappeared* in the VST… and somehow over time, the VST UI update behavior became less brittle, and somehow over time, I think I have arrived back at fully configured UI and no more need to change it and no more crashy behavior.

But given the extremity of the situation, I’d like to understand what actually happened… and given that it seems to have been massaged back into place, I wonder if there is some Special Knowledge I might be lacking that might have either enabled me to avoid the problem altogether or to more rapidly, efficiently, and purposefully, resolve it. 

Anybody?

Phil :)