After playing for a while, CPU use rises and sound stutters

Hello!

First of all, great software idea! I’m loving it so far!

Unfortunately, I am having some problems with Hookpad on multiple platforms. On my PC, which is running Windows 64 Pro, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i5 2500, with a Focusrite Scarlett Solo using ASIO as my audio device, when running Hookpad in Chrome, everything works great at first and CPU usage is very low. But if I play something for a while, even if just looping the same four bar bit, audio will start stuttering and cutting out, and this will get worse and worse over time. If I look at Resource Monitor, I can see that CPU usage for Chrome is higher when this starts happening. Before the problem, Chrome’s CPU use is at about 6%. When the problem starts, it will be at 30-40%.

The stuttering is worse and will start sooner if a more complex band arrangement is selected.

I haven’t yet confirmed that the problem also occurs in Firefox on my PC.

On my tablet, a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 2014 edition, in Chrome, the same thing happens, but much sooner, and the stuttering is much worse, and very quickly, sound will cease entirely. The same thing happens on my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S5. I’ve tried Firefox on both Android devices with similar results.

Yes, my devices are all a little dated, but my PC is still rather powerful and I do much, much more demanding audio things in Reaper with no trouble. And the thing is, Hookpad works perfectly looping the same material for a while. Something changes over time that causes it to fail. It seems to me that if the app were too demanding for my devices, it wouldn’t work even at first. I suspect some kind of accumulating resource demand that results from a software bug.

If I close Chrome and restart it and Hookpad, everything is fine again for a little while.

Hookpad is completely unusable on my tablet and phone due to this problem. At least on my PC, I can work for a little while before having to reload things. On my Android devices, the problem shows up too soon, though it does play perfectly for a couple of minutes.

I tried to reproduce the problem on my PC in Firefox. I can’t make it happen. I even added tons of extra instruments with the band editor. No problem even after looping for over an hour. So at least on my PC, the problem seems limited to Chrome.

I realized that my Chrome version on my PC might be out of date. It was version 77 something. I just updated it to 78.0.3904.70. I am now looping some material with 35 tracks. So far so good. I’ll let it run a while and will let you know what happens.

So far, it seems fine with the Chrome update! I also updated Chrome on my tablet. Peformance seems better, but more complex band arrangements fail to work, as might be expected for a slightly old tablet. For some reason, the newer version of Chrome doesn’t appear to be available for my phone, so I can’t test that. But at the moment, my problem seems mainly solved. I should have made sure everything is up to date before posting!

Thanks for creating this extremely useful software! It is just what I need at this stage in my musical journey!

Although not fully agreed by Apple, It’s good to move background apps away (swipe-up) to have a clean iPad. It works almost 100% on my iPadpro (old 11 series IC’s)