Minifreak V hangs/crashes in all situations since update 2.0.0.720

Sadly, I’m still waiting for a fix from Arturia, and I have not heard anything for a while.

I’m now working with the old firmware, everyting pre-2.0, meaning I cannot use the new format for patches, and also not the store, and neither the new features. I’m hoping to hear something soon.

What is your environment?
Windows 10 too?

Yep
Intel(R) Core™ i5 CPU M 540 @ 2.53GHz
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit 19045.4046

On my MacBook Pro M1 everything runs fine.

My issue was on Win10 also, originally, but I have since upgraded Win10 to Win11 in hopes to solving the problem, but the exact same issue remains.

I have also offered running a debugger attached to the software, because I can exactly re-create the problem, as it always triggers for me when the window regains focus. Let me know if that is helpful. I would need some instructions on getting the right code running / having a symbols file, etc.

That’s kind of weirdly interesting.
If you’ve done a complete new Windows-installation, I assume we can exclude any settings- or driver issues.
So the question remains, what exactly the program is trying to communicate with when receiving focus.
Only things that come to my mind:

  • audio interface
  • graphics interface
  • Midi interface

That said:
I it were on my system, I’d change the settings / parameters for all of the above and try again to narrow the cause down.
Maybe even change some hardware (audio-interface) if available.

As the old saying goes:
“What do IT experts do, if they have a flat tire on the back right of their car?
Change the tire to the front right and see if the fault migrates.”

Here’s another observation / idea:
I observed, that MF V is behaving differently than other Arturia instruments (like Analog Lab or Pigments).
I.e. when I open MF-V in Ableton (both 11 and 12), it is first launched with the wrong resolution, I have to close and open it again to see the correct resolution (this is not the case for the other Arturia instruments).
When launching MF standalone, (at least sometimes) it seems as if the graphics are updated slightly delayed, as if in two phases.

That said:
What I would try is to change the graphics settings of my system, try different drivers or resolutions and (if possible) even a different graphics card.

Hope that helps to find a setup running on your computer!

That’s a really interesting observation. I’ll give that a try asap, thanks! Analog Lab for instance runs without any issues whatsoever.

@Square, @Zijon:

Did you come any closer to a solution of your problems?

Today I realized that the above described behavior (graphics glitch when launching MF from within Ableton) only happens when under setting the stat-page is set to ‘advanced’
image

When it’s set to ‘Home’, no problems.
You might want to try if that makes a difference on your side!

Thanks, Stefan. I’ll see if I can change that. Usually the program crashes within a few seconds. So far I have made no progress, and Arturia support is surprisingly and disappointingly slow and inept so far. I’ll report back after trying their current proposal: updating the MiniFreak hardware (even if I fail to understand how that would fix a software problem that occurs even without the MiniFreak connected to my computer).

I am running into similar issues. After a perilous update process taking several attempts, I noticed what I first termed to be crashes or hangs with certain patches. Unplugging USB everything seems to work. This is without miniFreak V even loaded!
Changing the midi channel in/out from all to 5 seems to fix it.
But man, for version 2 this is pretty flaky.

After more testing it is clear a USB connection makes SEQ unreliable.

– Harald

Another aspect you might want to take into account:
Compatibility issues with Ableton and pigments 5 - Software Instruments / Pigments - The Sound Explorers Community (arturia.com)

In the above thread someone encountered severe issues with Pigments, that could be traced back (and solved!) to some settings of his graphics card.

Since I can imagine the issue has to do with graphic settings, this might be worth checking!

Thanks, Stefan. I’ve since tried all possible resolutions and graphics settings. My system doesn’t run a NVIDIA GPU so I’m suspecting that’s a red herring. I’ve sent all the crash reports and diagnostics I could think of to Arturia, sadly their response time is measured in weeks, which really sucks.

I have since found a solution for my situation: I have reinstalled all possible drivers I could find for my system, including a BIOS update, CPU/chipset driver, onboard video drivers and dedicated video drivers. Also other peripheral drivers for stuff like WLAN, onboard audio and bluetooth and USB.

That fixed something, as I can now keep MinifFreak V running without it hanging upon losing windows focus.

I was halfway debugging the software myself but sadly Arturia’s support wouldn’t help me do this. But I suspect there is a I/O driver issue, perhaps for USB, but it could also be something completely different (like video or CPU related).

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Oh, and as a software developer myself, I would like to add my opinion as well.

I know it’s hard to support every system with its multitude of drivers and configurations. But support should at least have helped me by pointing me in the right direction. I don’t think they have ever actually looked at my debugging information. I just got a standard reply for new firmware, which didn’t solve the issue at all (and in fact bricked the hardware - which I then had to have replaced). I have been in contact with this issue for the last 4 (!!) months, without any solution or compromise offered.

You may understand that I am quite disappointed with the support received.

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Same here! I really loved Arturia products and the hardware device is great (pray I never need hardware support from them!) but their software support team is either massively understaffed or straight incompetent/negligent. I had to point out multiple times that the firmware update on the hardware would not fix a software-only issue. Currently, I’m getting generic “thank you for your patience, please send us crash logs from xyz” every 2-3 weeks, no suggestions for a fix, nothing. I patiently supply the logs and hope to get an answer within the month. Not great.

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Of course I understand your frustration!
Having been a software developer myself and responsible for customer support in our company for quite a while, I am quite often VERY frustrated with the quality of the support.
There seem to be only some (few) people at Arturia who even make the effort to read the whole ticket. Most of the time (even after a detailed problem-description and mentioning that OF COURSE I’ve already tried to unsinstall / reinstall and clear the prefs) I get answers of the quality like ‘make sure you have plugged in the power cable’.

It’s a shame that Arturia doesn’t make use of the willingness and an competence of their customers (like you).

As I said, sometimes I had a really good conversation with people from support who eventually listened to the information I submitted and they even asked me to test something prior to public release.

I learned from these experiences that I won’t give up until they listen and establish a fruitful conversation.

Stefan

Hello,

I have the same problem myself. I observed hanging also on Pigment software - I thought it has something to do with wave animations, as it does not hang (or hangs very rarely) when the library pages are open.
Having read your solution I have checked that switching the audio settings from ASIO to Windows Audio (or Windows Audio low latency) reduces the problem significantly - the app does not hang on the advanced screens at all. (It does hang sometimes on the audio settings page, but here you can move it back to normal by switching windows focus to another window and back).

Best regards,

Piotr

The support has helped me :slight_smile:
After a few mails and sending them dxdiag.exe logs - it occured that my AMD Ryzen graphics drivers were not up to date, and they gave me the link to new ones. I have reinstalled the drivers and all the problems have vanished. Everything is working smoothly, without any glitches.

Best regards,

Piotr

Hi @PiotrKasprzyk
That’s good to hear!

Glad to see you’re all sorted now and thanks for the update.