Pretty F’in Angry

bug reports
1

You know what “F’in” means right? That’s how I feel. Big time. I just lost an hour and 8 minutes work in Hookpad. This is not the first time this has happened. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a whole song in Hookpad thinking you had Auto-Save implemented like you should’ve now had for many years. Literally, I was done with the song and as I was going to do a final save so I could close the app down, the app crashed and I lost it all. I was pretty F’in angry then too. I posted here on the forum after that happened. The team knows about this issue but it has never been fixed.

The intention behind the app is great. I really do need a capability such as this. Mostly, it works. It’s obvious that a whole helluva lot of work has gone into this app. I’ve written in to this forum before and the guys that make Hookpad are really good guys.

I just wish the app worked. It’s pretty f’in unusable right now, and I am TIRED of losing work. Man, I am angry that you let this app do this to me another time. What are you f’in working on??? This needs to be fixed.

So, yeah, I learned over a year ago you got to save often in this app. You never know when it will crash or, as in this case, it didn’t actually blow up but it stopped saving my work an hour and 8 minutes before I saved and closed it because there were other problems and I felt I should restart. During that hour and 8 minutes, I was saving often via the menu Save option.

You can do a lot of work in an hour and 8 minutes. Did I tell you I am angry about this???

There are other problems with the app. Sometimes, apparently after using the app for awhile without rebooting, the app starts doing things on its own. Here’s what was happening when I decided to reboot after 1 hour and 8 minutes: after making a number of edits elsewhere in the song, I had just laid in the notes on the third stave and was going back to the first measure to correct the rhythm. On beat 2 of this first measure, I had a quarter note. I needed an 1/8th rest and then an 1/8 note instead. I made the change, went to play that stave and as soon as I hit Play all the changes I had made in that measure reverted back to where they were before I made the update. Then the app played over that measure with the wrong rhythm. I then made the update again and again, but the problem reoccurred every time. The app simply stopped allowing me to make edits. That’s when I went to reboot after saving. When I restarted and went to open my song, I could easily see that the last save was 1 hour and 8 minutes before that moment. Sure enough, all the changes to the verse and the entire bridge was wiped out.

I AM F’IN ANGRY ABOUT THIS. I AM TIRED OF LOSING MY F’IN WORK IN YOUR APP! Fix it or I am done!

How long should we run the app before we reboot to solve this problem? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? That would be helpful to know. I am on an iPad running in your “standalone” app. Safari is my browser. If this app doesn’t work properly on iOS, please pull it down and or least tell me to get off of it.

I think I own everything your company has produced from Crush and this to all the HookTheory stuff. I am a good customer. DON’T DO THIS TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!

Kevin

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i hope you do realize there is an autosave feature

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Hi Chicknzz, I did not know there was an auto-backup feature in the app. What a great idea that would be… especially if it worked.

Well, I checked, and it doesn’t work. I can see all the backups there, which is very encouraging. But there’s no way to open any of them. It’s just a long list and there’s no Open button or other UI element to actually open a file. When I highlight the file I want and press Return, nothing happens. When I double-click on the highlighted file, the long list goes away but the file doesn’t load in the app. Nothing changes in the UI in fact and I can only see content from the last save that the app ran.

So, I thought maybe it couldn’t load because the later, unfinished song was already open in the UI. So I closed it, created a new, blank file and tried to recover again. Once again, it doesn’t work. However, I do see a little window that tells me that auto-backups are saved for every 30 seconds of active use. I’ve never seen that little window before. And that’s great to hear but, again, no way to open these files so there is no value here.

More problems. Now that I’ve done the step above, I can no longer see the long list of auto-backups for the file I was working on this morning. They’re all gone! All of them! What did the app do - clear the cache and wipe everything out just now?

So I close and reopen Hookpad, select Open, press Continue. Then I go to File, Recover from Auto-Backup. I get that little dialog where it’s apparently starting to make backups. But it’s just starting to make backups! WTF? So I press that little Open button, the little dialog goes away, and nothing happens. Nothing.

So I go to File, Open. A long list of previous files displays, but now ALL OF MY WORK FROM THIS MORNING HAS VANISHED! I AM NOT HAPPY!

So I go to the web browser and open Hookpad from there. (I was using standalone.) I go to Open my files and it’s confirmed: all of my work from today has disappeared! WTF?

What am I missing here? How can it be this hard to do basic tasks in this app?

I grabbed a screenshot but there is no way to attach a screenshot in this forum.

Chicknzz, I thank you for offering up a potential solution at least. It’s not your fault that I am in a worse position now than I was earlier.

Anybody have any andditional ideas?

Kevin

4

try pressing [Ctrl] and [-] at the same time because for some reason if the list of backups get really long and the button to open them go off the screen. Please note that it saves 30 seconds of whatever is in your project, even blank projects.

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As for the problem where all your auto-backups are gone, I have no idea what happened. Maybe you left Hookpad on too long where it overwrote your backup of your song? If so, I really hate to break it to you, but your song is probably only gone now.

1 Like
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Chicknzz, you must be a great person. Thanks for jumping in again on this.

Yeah, that auto-recover window sure could benefit from a scroll bar. How do you not have a scroll bar there? That’s a basic UI element for a window that can extend past the screen. I don’t get why it’s designed that way, especially when a scroll bar is a OS feature and doesn’t require any extra programming effort to use. Does anybody know what this is coded in?

I just checked and my backups have returned, so I’m back where I was when I posted - I’ve lost an hour and 8 minutes of intense work because this app doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

I figure Dennis or someone else from the team will jump in tomorrow. I’m interested to see what they say…

Thanks again, Chicknzz.
Kevin

6

Hey Kevin,

I’m sorry for loosing your work. I know that stuff like this is very frustrating. We’ve all been there.

I have fixed the issue with auto recovery modal not being scrollable and not showing the open button. We’ll push an update with that fix soon.

Now to why all this happened to you, I can only guess right now. I think you might have triggered some combination of events that made your song itself crash Hookpad so it couldn’t save anymore. At least the notes that were displayed wrongly might point into this direction.

So just to understand it right what’s your current status with your song?
You could recover the version you had 1 hour and 8 minutes before that crash?
What’s the name of the song? Perhaps I can have a look at the file and see if something is already broken there.

Regards and sorry again!
Dennis

7

Hey Dennis, I knew you’d reply! Thank you!

The song is called My Only True Love. I am still missing the one hour 8 minutes. I can now see the early work. I lost the bridge and other changes to the verse. You’re welcome to have a look. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the song file though.

As I mentioned, this is not the first time I’ve lost work in Hookpad. What the app really needs is an auto-save feature that works. For example, when you run that auto-save code you can easily check programmatically to verify the save worked properly and if it didn’t it should generate an internal error which you can catch and then notify the user that the app is having a problem, and maybe we should do a Save As or reboot the program, or continue at our own risk.

Beyond that, I for one don’t see the value in capturing every 30 seconds of ‘active’ work in the app. I’d be content with 5 minutes. Capturing every 30 seconds makes the list too long and hides other songs that we might want to work on. Makes the whole auto-recover functionality look and feel clunky.

Another idea is to use the Auto-Recover functionality to display a folder tree instead of all the auto-saves. When I open Auto-Recover what I really want to see first is a list of all the songs I could recover from, with the most recently opened at the top. Then, if each song displayed as a folder, we could drill down into the correct song’s folder to find the version we want to recover. This approach only creates clutter when the user has asked for it.

The best long-term approach, of course, is to simply save automatically and don’t require any actions from the user to save. Don’t let us screw the app up because we will find a way. If you do catch an error, then you share messages like I outlined above.

In closing, I just want to emphasize how important it is for a user to be able to rely on a program’s save capability. I don’t know why I am so affected by Hookpad crashing and losing work but I am. I’ve certainly seen software crash before. My guess is because I think Hookpad is an incredibly useful app that has already been very helpful to me. But it’s also a creative app and every time I use it I am using the creative side of my brain. Then, to be interrupted in mid-creation by a software crash just completely disrupts the flow. In fact, it eliminates the flow for some period of time. That first time I lost work I had created an entire song. I didn’t save because I assumed it auto-saved. So that’s on me, I realize, but after that crash I stayed away from the app for like 8-9 months.

I don’t think there is any more important task before your team right now than sitting down, figuring this out, and architecting something that can be reliable 99% of the time.

If you do have any tips for us about how often we should do a Save As or similar, please let us know. Thanks!

Kevin