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[Spike1000]

I had a weekend plagued with the "Blurry\White Screen of Wait" issues 

See https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,115542.0.html for more details of the symptoms.

It's reproducible at will (which is a good thing for debugging), but caused me no end of frustration.

1) My media centre 'Server' i5 NUC was running some SACD_extract tasks. This is CPU intensive but windows coped (albeit a bit more slowly). MC on the other hand went into the "Blurry\White Screen of Wait" so frequently with just just routine tasks/clicks that it was unusable.

2) My video files are split between a local disk and a NAS, the NAS is not powered on all the time. MC will enter the "Blurry\White Screen of Wait" stage when trying to do anything involving access to the files on the (powered off) NAS. (I'll open a separate thread over this).

I really hope MC25 is treated as an opportunity to get this "Blurry\White Screen of Wait" problem resolved as it has continued to frustrate me for several years now. Hopefully the reproducibility scenarios will allow the developers to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

Spike

[michael123]

I don't know.. you're doing something wrong IMHO

* I am ripping sacd offline, never using MC machine for that, even though it is i7 / 16GB powerhorse

* I am not using NAS during rip process. When the files are tagged locally using mp3tag, files then are copied to NAS and scanned by MC

* My NAS is always ON. Few years when it was going to sleep, I also put it awake before using MC. Never going to sleep while MC is running. Every Windows application will behave the same way

[Spike1000]

I think you missed my point or I didn't explain it very well 

There is a known issue "Blurry\White Screen of Wait" with MC that appears when a thread is blocked or baulked or something. The screen expands (goes blurry) and covers the task bat at the bottom of the screen, clicking in MC causes the screen to go 'white'. It can happen, occasionally, at various times even with powerful machines.

I gave two examples where it could be reproduced at will this could be useful for the developers to trace and fix the issue. One was high CPU on the machine. I happened to be extracting files from SACD ISOs, but this process has nothing to do with MC, MC was just running at the time.

The second was when some of my media files were 'off line'. These happened to be on a NAS, but that's not relevant here. They were not available to MC and MC displayed the above symptoms during its 'timeout' periods when attempting to access the files. This set up  isn't ideal, but there some things you can do to help MC deal with that situation, but that's in the other thread, in this one I'm just talking about how to reproduce the Blurry\White Screen of Wait symptoms.

Spike

[ErikN]

I debated a while about commenting mostly because I do not want to unintentionally annoy anyone developing/supporting software my family uses on a daily basis and which I really think is great. I 100% agree with and support Spike's sentiment.

Problems like these have little to do with CPU. Blurry UI, unresponsive UI, and strange failures in the presence of NAS, and seemingly antivirus triggered problems are all IO. The first two are typical of IO blocking UI threads. A number of other failure classes come about when slow IO skews thread interaction and exposes races. Users really should be able to have slow remote NAS, offline storage, heck even local mounts of cloud object stores via questionable broadband. (I know -- easy to say. We'd all like free beer and personal flying machines included too.) It is CPU only to the extent a CPU intensive task might hold up IO -- on-the-fly conversions, software raid, network + AV, etc.

As an example, of sorts, I almost never have any of these problems. JR core lives on a PCI SSD with GB/s random access. Most media is on local disks with 500+MB/s that are never allowed to spin down. JR rarely flinched even when I had two parallel transcode pipelines reprocessing a bunch of content for 48 hours straight while still recording 1-3 shows at a time and letting the family watch "TV" as usual. The cpu was pegged at 100%. IO, however, was largely idle.

To me, JR taking on an effort to better tolerate slow IO and temporarily unreachable media would be as valuable a line item as any A/V feature. It would open up more interesting home-media architectures. My 2-cents and probably only worth a penny.

[JimH]

ErikN,
Thanks for your comments.

Spike,
Could you run a benchmark (under Help) and paste the results here?

[Matt]

What actions in particular cause Media Center to appear stalled?

Maybe we could improve.

Thanks.

[Negasonic]

What actions in particular cause Media Center to appear stalled?

Maybe we could improve.

Thanks.

Stalled as in "Vertically stretched screen that covers the task bar":

I think the very first time I experienced this was probably after one of the updates sometime in 2015 (not 100% sure about the year) when I was right-clicking an image in Windows Explorer and choose 'copy', then tabbing into MC and selecting an album and right-click/Cover Art/Paste From Clipboard (Image or URL). It took longer than expected for MC to update the cover art with the new file and during that time the MC screen stretched vertically covering up the task bar at the bottom. This still happens nowadays occasionally.

Another example when MC stretched the screen can be found here: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,116758.msg807250.html#msg807250 In short I was using 'Remove Tags' on a lot of files and the progress indicator pop-up window would hide itself behind MC. Apart from that MC still looked fine, until I clicked anywhere on the screen, which made the screen stretch over the task bar and it would not resolve itself until (the hidden) progress window was finished with its countdown.

From that same thread I am mentioning this: "Using "Update Tags (from Library)' acts in a similar way, with the difference that I actually see the progress indicator on top of MC, counting down. But if I switch to another app or click inside MC (outside of the progress window), MC will also be unresponsive and stretch the screen vertically. And the progress indicator will disappear behind MC somewhere." This happened when performing the task on a big chunk of files.

Apart from these specific examples, it seems to happen (stretched screen) whenever MC expects something to happen sooner rather than later. A delay that goes over its expected time frame. Something caused by slow disks, slow networks etc.

I am currently not using my desktop pc which the above examples was experienced on, but using a laptop where I access my music files from a cloud provider. This naturally causes some delays now and then, which is all expected. I get the stretched screen now and then from just playing a regular mp3 from the cloud and in these cases (when the screen stretches) it usually goes like this: The 'spinning up drive' window will pop up and remain for a couple of seconds, then it will disappear and just as it disappears... the screen stretches and covers up the task bar, until the file has been fully loaded and playback starts.

Is the problem related to the pop-up windows in some way? The pop-up windows gets main focus on screen, but if that window disappears/gets hidden behind main window before the task is finished, then the main window gets cranky and stretches itself all over the place?

The complete freezing when the screen gets washed out/white with windows pop-ups asking if you want to close the application usually only appears if you click on the screen while MC already is in "stretched mode".

[Spike1000]

Spike,
Could you run a benchmark (under Help) and paste the results here?

Just for the record; I'm not 'bashing' MC in any way, I'm just reporting circumstances that causes odd MC behaviour, my only aim is help try and make MC better. The test circumstances are not normal (ie sustained high background CPU load) but they aren't uncommon either. They readily demonstrate the odd behaviour and therefore could be useful in debugging the issue.

That said my MC server is a Intel NUC5i5RYH  Intel® Core i5-5250U Processor (3M Cache, up to 2.70 GHz). OS and MC DB on SSD. Music on internal 1TB HDD, video (well some of it) on USB 3 connected 2TB HDD. The rest is on 8TB, Gb connected NAS (jumbo frames enabled) . Benchmark:

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 5.597 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 3.061 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 3.328 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 1.702 seconds
Score: 1388

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 1.091 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.593 seconds
    Direct copying... 0.929 seconds
    Small renders... 1.487 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 3.064 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 1.650 seconds
Score: 2496

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.341 seconds
    Populate database... 1.276 seconds
    Save database... 0.394 seconds
    Reload database... 0.214 seconds
    Search database... 2.153 seconds
    Sort database... 1.055 seconds
    Group database... 0.920 seconds
Score: 3385

JRMark (version 24.0.72 64 bit): 2423

(My i7 207/88 laptop scores 3476)

I'll probably do a video (you know how I like videos  ) to show the problem and send a link to Matt. I'll see how I'm fixed for time tonight or later this week.

Spike
 

[JimH]

I don't need to see a video.  I know you have a problem.  I'm just trying to narrow down the possible causes.

What happens if you test without using the NAS?  Video from a NAS should work fine, but NAS drives also have bugs.

[Awesome Donkey]

I see it happening randomly sometimes when starting MC after a fresh Windows reboot (even though all the media is local and not accessed from a NAS) using my Modern Cards: Acrylic skins but it only lasts 5 to 10 seconds max.

[Spike1000]

I don't need to see a video.  I know you have a problem.  I'm just trying to narrow down the possible causes.

What happens if you test without using the NAS?  Video from a NAS should work fine, but NAS drives also have bugs.

The video was to help Matt and show the specific actions/situations that were causing issues. I thought it would be quicker for me to do that than write it down or try and screen shot. ..

The NAS is a bit of a red herring (I think) 98% of MC is audio use and those files are on a drive in the NUC. Issues with the NAS not being on and MC 'pausing' is understandable and not the main thrust of my point. It's only recently that it's been added as a another media drive to my system and the issue is longer standing than that.

Let me know what what/how you want me to proceed.

Spike

[Negasonic]

In addition to what I wrote a couple of posts above, about the possibility of popups being the main cause: Another user from the MC Beta Team reported about a similar thing last year:

I have just decided to save the cover art of a large number (18000) of files to the MC 24 cover art folder. No problems until you click off of MC to work on something else but on returning to MC you get the whirling icon, but all of the popup notifications are hidden behind MC. The program is still dutifully saving the cover art, but doing a long job should not really cause a program to freeze, and the popups should still be visible over the  MC  frozen main screen.

I think this is the root of the problem. These temporary popups that automatically show up in the middle of the screen when MC performs some time consuming tasks (spinning up drive, progression countdowns, please wait etc) seem a bit unstable. They should always be on top of the screen until MC is done with the task. If they disappear from the front, the main MC window will get the vertically stretched look and it will seem as if MC has frozen (it hasn't).   

[ErikN]

I was thinking of an even more simple and direct approach than tracking down any specific reported issue. I suspect a number of items can be exposed via :

Case #1 - Basic single instance MC (not a client/server) Local media + NAS media

    #1a - Pull network cable to NAS
           Obviously any media on NAS will not play but MC should remain responsive and
              gracefully fail to play. All local media, playlist access, etc. should work.
              Even tag changes to disconnected media should work minus updating sidecars.

    #1b - Insert a network bridge between MC and NAS
           Make network slow (high latency and/or low bandwidth)
           Simple setup is a cheap linux box, configure network as bridge, and use linux
            traffic control (tc) to shape/reduce traffic, e.g. reduce to 300Kbps.
           Everything should work except higher bitrate A/V may rebuffer/stall.

Case #2 - Client / Server MC setup; Server has local media

    #2a - Pull network cable to server
             Client may have little that it can do but it should remain responsive and complain a lot.

    #2b - Insert a network bridge
             Everything should work. UI should remain responsive.
             Media will be slow to start with rebuffering and stalls

Case #3 - Mix #1 and #2 (Client to Server to NAS)

    #3a - Pull network to NAS and while using Client
    #3b - Slow network to NAS while using Client

I also recommend enabling any IO intensive tasks like auto-import's audio-analysis for video.

Aside from day-to-day usability and reducing customer problems, new scenarios become less fringe (Multiple often-off NAS, Offsite NAS or Drive mapped to "cloud" , Client 1000 miles from Server over a VPN, ...)

           

[Spike1000]

Test (2) carried out last night:

Upgrade to MC 24.0.75

Play DSF track
Initial high CPU
VLC screen capture video taking some resource
Start SACD ISO extract in command window

Clicking 'around' causes white screen of wait within a few clicks.
(Deliberately click on the blurry screen to get the white screen of wait. MC doesn't recover.)
Try killing apps
MC 24 not responding
MC 24 Server Suspended
Take a process dump of MC.
Have to kill the process

Restart MC
Play FLAC
Play a track with Play doctor
Play a track with Play doctor
Play a track with Play doctor
Play DSF track
Start SACD ISO extract in command window
Seems OK

Leave PC running. Stop video capture.

Return to PC later.

MC has disappeared and is no longer running.

Restart MC. MC has lost its config. (eg skin reverted to default!)
Have to restore from library backup! :-(
MC has to rebuild its thumbnails.

I didn't remember to look at the event logs. Will try to look at the weekend.


If I was to take a guess I'd say it's IO related rather than CPU related. And to stress again, these are not normal use conditions, these were aggressive test conditions engineered to reproduce an issue.

All my NAS devices were running but nothing was accessed from them by me. I only played audio files and these are all on a drive local to the NUC.

Spike

[JimH]

MC losing its configuration is extremely unusual.  I can't think of how that could happen unless there are external problems with disk I/O at the OS level.

Is there anything else unusual about your machine?  Overclocking, etc.?

[AndrewFG]

Problems like these have little to do with CPU. Blurry UI, unresponsive UI, and strange failures in the presence of NAS, and seemingly antivirus triggered problems are all IO. The first two are typical of IO blocking UI threads. A number of other failure classes come about when slow IO skews thread interaction and exposes races.

Just my 2c here..

I’m sure the problem is indeed a thread synchronisation issue.

The obvious part is not to do any IO on the main UI thread. It’s easy to say but often hard to do, since even if you offload the IO onto a separate thread, it has eventually to trigger something in the UI once the IO is done.

The other less obvious part, is what to do when a thread blocks “forever”. In the best case you end up overloading your RAM with increasing numbers of frozen threads, but in the worst case even if the UI thread is still running, it never gets triggered to do anything useful as a result of the frozen IO.

In computer terms “forever” means anything more than about 0.1 seconds..

One solution that I have used in the past with some success is, instead of using Wait_Infinite, to rather use Wait_Timeout. Or alternatively create a second timer “buddy” thread that monitors the IO thread and kills it if it blocks for too long. This does require a bit of housekeeping code to remove the thus killed thread from memory..

[Spike1000]

MC losing its configuration is extremely unusual.  I can't think of how that could happen unless there are external problems with disk I/O at the OS level.

Is there anything else unusual about your machine?  Overclocking, etc.?

I think the config  'went away' as MC 'exited' rather than shutdown. I've had the issue before when I've had to kill MC for one reason or another. I didn't look too deeply as to what was lost; I just know if my skin doesn't come back (ie reset to the default) its time to reach for a library backup and restore as I don't trust what's left.

The NUC is not overclocked or unusual. It just runs MC as my server on a very plain Windows 10 install.

Spike

[JimH]

I think the config  'went away' as MC 'exited' rather than shutdown.

Doesn't matter which.  The configuration is stored in the registry.

I've had the issue before when I've had to kill MC for one reason or another. I didn't look too deeply as to what was lost; I just know if my skin doesn't come back (ie reset to the default) its time to reach for a library backup and restore as I don't trust what's left.

If that happens at all, there may be an underlying hardware or software problem.

[Spike1000]

I've seen a few of programs go 'unresponsive' and create the white screen of wait in the past. All when they are busy processing something. One application could do it for hours but spring back to life when the processing was complete. The peculiar thing (from my point of view at least) is why the blurry screen and disappearing task bar? I have never seen this before; is this actually a clue to what's going on?

Spike

[Spike1000]

Doesn't matter which.  The configuration is stored in the registry.If that happens at all, there may be an underlying hardware or software problem.

In that case I have no explanation. I had to restore an MC client the other day, that's a N2820 NUC. I had to kill MC on it as it had hung trying to play a 96kHz FLAC to a 48kHz capable DAC. On MC restart the skin was back to the default so I restored a backup as it's fast, safe and reliable and returns me to a known starting point.

Spike

[AndrewFG]

The peculiar thing (from my point of view at least) is why the blurry screen and disappearing task bar? I have never seen this before; is this actually a clue to what's going on?

It might indeed be a clue. I think it is a Windows artifact, which occurs either..

a) When Windows sends messages (SendMessage call) to the application and these calls do not return within a certain period of time. Typically SendMessage calls arise from user input events, (mouse, keyboard, menus, etc.), or system events (timers, interrupts, network traffic, system configuration or state changes, etc.), or,

b) When the application does not make any calls to the Windows kernel (or perhaps the Windows API, or at least some parts thereof) within a similar certain period of time.

[Spike1000]

I've stumbled across another windows application that displayed similar symptoms when very 'busy'. . .  It did the 'blurry' thing when the screen zooms and the task bar disappears. . .

It's the Checkpoint (firewall) SmartConsole R80.20. This doesn't appear to use the 'traditional' windows management as the screen is somewhat 'unconventional' in layout, I wonder if the windowing library is common to both applications.

Spike

[Negasonic]

Reproducible test

Very quick and simple everyone-and-their-grandmother-can-try-it-out, 100% reproducible (for me), "blurry vertically expanded screen that covers the taskbar" scenario by simply using 'Update Tags (from Library)' on some local files.

I run both MC (24.0.75) and Windows Explorer in maximized windows. Lock The Taskbar=ON. Automatically hide the taskbar=OFF. Media files from local drive.

Important:
Make sure to select a number of files that will make the procedure last for at least a minute or more. The longer the better. This is to give you time to check the behavior of MC while it is performing the task.
While testing this, have at least one other application open (I am using Windows Explorer for this test).

• Run 'Update Tags (from Library)' on your selected files.
   
• The "Please Wait..." window pops up showing the progress.
  The mouse cursor will have the blue swirl look if positioned outside of the "Please Wait..." window. Why?
  You can click on the "Please Wait..." window without any problems (which will also cause it to get main focus - why does it not have that from the beginning?).
   
• Click ONCE repeatedly somewhere within MC with the blue swirl mouse pointer (outside of the "Please Wait..." progress window)
  OR click in the taskbar on any of the other currently running applications (Windows Explorer in my case).
  (if the screen gets expanded and you happen to click again, the screen might go white with questions asking if you want to close down or wait for the app etc)
   
• The "Please Wait..." window disappears and MC immediately expands vertically to the point that it covers the taskbar.
  If you switched to another app on the taskbar instead of clicking on screen, switching back to MC will show the same thing.
  But what happened to that "Please Wait..." progress window popup? Why did it disappear? Where did it go?
   
• To find it you need to tab out from MC (since MC is covering the screen so you cannot click on the taskbar) to another application (Windows Explorer in my case).
   
• Now you should have access to the taskbar. Click on the 'Show Desktop' icon in the lower right corner.
   
• With the Desktop in front of you, click on Windows Explorer in the taskbar so that it opens up again and then immediately minimize it, so you see the Desktop again.
   
• On top of the Desktop you should now see the "Please Wait..." window alone by itself still counting down the progression of the task.
  When it is done with the task it will close down and you can now safely click on MC in the taskbar and it will open up fully restored to its normal non-expanded window size.

Note: Even if I do not click anywhere on the MC screen to cause the stretching, if I just sit and watch the "Please Wait..." progress until it finishes -  sometimes - in the split second when the "Please Wait..." window closes down to be replaced with the new pop-up window where it tells the outcome of the task - the screen expands.
Inbetween the appearances of those two pop-up windows.


Anyone willing to test this and see if they can reproduce it in order to help nailing down the reason for this weird behavior?
Do you get the blue swirling mouse pointer? Any differences?


Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0Pd5dvS5y_8



Edit: Changed clicking "ONCE" to "repeatedly", since it may require several clicks for it to trigger.
Off-Topic: Why can't I remove this list tag?  --->[/list]

[Matt]

I'm trying to reproduce but not having much luck.

I just get the wait message and clicking in MC doesn't do anything.  It's not possible to restore from the start menu when it's busy, but switching back to it by minimizing other programs just shows the wait message still running.

Not seeing anything else out of the ordinary on my Windows 10 box.

[Spike1000]

I'm trying to reproduce but not having much luck.

Matt, could you give us a steer on what you need or what would help you dig into this?
Scenarios, logs, windows events, videos etc etc.

I'm more than happy to assist but I think this needs co-ordination so any tests/symptoms/reports are meaningful and productive.

Spike

[Negasonic]

I'm trying to reproduce but not having much luck.

I just get the wait message and clicking in MC doesn't do anything.  It's not possible to restore from the start menu when it's busy, but switching back to it by minimizing other programs just shows the wait message still running.

Not seeing anything else out of the ordinary on my Windows 10 box.

Thanks for testing, Matt.

Is the blue swirling mouse pointer supposed to be part of the ordinary, or am I the only one getting it?

These tests have been performed on my old desktop pc from 2012.
Currently 2 internal mechanical HD's. Windows on a pretty old 500 GB drive. Media files on a 2-3 year old 2TB  drive. It can be a bit sluggish nowadays.

I tested some more this morning by copying a bunch of files to my new 1 month old laptop which previously only have been used with MC to play files from cloud storage or used as a client to my desktop pc.

I copied 1618 mp3's to the SSD drive of this laptop, created a new library in MC and imported these files. Selected them all and ran 'Update Tags (from Library')

Result: The only difference was that it took me about 6 clicks (instead of 1) for MC to lose the 'Please Wait..." window and expand over the task bar.

Here is a short video where you can see the clicks I do and how "Please Wait..." disappears and the screen expands over the task bar after the sixth click:
YouTube: https://youtu.be/0Pd5dvS5y_8
 

 

[JimH]

How about antivirus?

[Negasonic]

How about antivirus?

Windows Defender. I have run it both unmolested, turned off and tamed at various times with no impact on this issue. 

[JimH]

Turn off auto import, audio analysis, and cover art lookup.

[leezer3]

I'm trying to reproduce but not having much luck.

I just get the wait message and clicking in MC doesn't do anything.  It's not possible to restore from the start menu when it's busy, but switching back to it by minimizing other programs just shows the wait message still running.

Not seeing anything else out of the ordinary on my Windows 10 box.

I can definitely reproduce this one with files on network drives.
Not in front of MC at the minute, but maybe this is network IO rather than tagging?

[Negasonic]

Turn off auto import, audio analysis, and cover art lookup.

Those are always turned off. Audio analysis is set to run during import only (as far as I know, but just in case: I turned it off temporary and no difference) I don't see any other settings that would automatically run audio analysis while doing other tasks (like updating tags etc)?

I can definitely reproduce this one with files on network drives.
Not in front of MC at the minute, but maybe this is network IO rather than tagging?

IO/threading has been mentioned. Tagging itself is not the issue. That is just an example that I personally can use to enforce this expanded screen behavior.

There are multiple scenarios where this can happen, without enforcing it, usually involving unexpected slow access to something. When this occurs MC informs the user by showing a temporary "hold-on-I-am-busy-performing-a-task-right-now" popup window ("Please Wait... / "Spinning up drive..." etc) on top of the MC main screen.
If that popup window somehow loses its position on top of the main screen, the main screen will get cranky and expand vertically covering up the taskbar.

In my experience since a couple of years now, the popup window can get lost (disappear behind the main screen) by:

• Enforcing it by clicking on the area behind this popup (with the blue swirl mouse pointer - see my test example in previous post)
• Opening up/Tabbing out to another program and then back again. The time it takes for MC to expand the screen varies, sometimes its instant, sometimes I can switch back to MC and it still looks fine with the popup still on top - for a couple of seconds - and then it disappears and the screen expands.
• Just disappear by itself after a certain time without any interaction from the user. I see this sometimes with 'Spinning up drive'. Or never even show up on top of the screen in the first place. I've seen this happen just by selecting an album, or even just one track, pasting cover art from clipboard, switching library.

MC does not freeze or hang during this. Its just (visually at least) an ugly GUI glitch during the time the popup window is not on top of the main screen.
Other applications are not affected.
When MC is done with the task (updating tags/playback finally starts etc etc) everything goes back to normal again.


MC displays its various "I-am-busy" informations in a couple of different ways.

• Popup window
  'Please Wait...' and 'Spinning up drive'. Needs to stay on top of MC's main screen until the task is done to avoid glitches
• Bottom toolbar
  Thats where 'Rename, Move, & Copy Files...' shows the progression (and hey! you can still click around in MC while it is busy with this task!) I have never seen the GUI choke up during 'Rename, Move...'
• Player info/track status area
  Buffering % progress is shown here, seen this when playing files that are stored on cloud. Would this be a good place to show 'Spinning up drive...' as well, instead of in a popup window?
• Action Window
  Converting audio formats, for instance. Never seen any glitches while MC is processing this. And you have full access to the main interface during its course.

Anything else?


I have basically non-existent IO/threading/under-the-hood knowledge, so I can only report what I see happen in front of me on the screen. These popups getting hidden behind the main screen may have nothing at all to do with the core problem, but they do behave different from other software I use. Mp3tag for instance. There I can select tens of thousands of files in one go and run a re-tagging session that also pops up a progression window. But its a stable progression window. You can still click around on the main screen underneath and still use its other functions.

Sorry about the long text... a lot of it repeated, I guess, but hope there were at least some particles of meat in there 

[Spike1000]

Really weird one this afternoon. Just jumped back in my play Doctor play list.
I got the blue 'circle of wait' in MC. I knew if I clicked in MC it'd turn into the white screen of wait so I didn't click straight away.
Got the blurry screen as the task bar disappeared.
Clicked in MC and only the context menu went white... Never seen that before.
Anyways after 3 minutes MC came back to me!

Event Viewer said 'AppHangTransient'

Something odd with the context menu as it was left on the screen.

In the end the machine ran out of virtual memory, but it recovered without a restart.

MC consumed 6GB of RAM!!! (no, not playing huge DSF files, just normal FLAC tracks). Huge firefox memory consumption is larger than normal but I run 4 copies at once on this machine and have a lot of tabs open so it does normally use a few GB. I think the background tasks in firefox may have contributed to/triggered the issue in MC.

16GB i7 laptop from 2018.

Spike

[Spike1000]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119812.msg828364.html#msg828364

Do not begin Text Search automatically?

Common situation is that I start to type search terms, plain keywords most often, sometimes [Artist] or [Album]. I may have mistyped, press backspace a number of times, or double click. By this time, MC has started to search on part of the terms, and does not respond to more input. Windows 10 mouse pointer becomes the spinning, blue circle. Screen often goes light, with the prompt from Windows about whether to wait for MC or end. It is not difficult to terminate MC this way, without Windows having prompted. Workaround is to stop and wait, or use the Wizard.

[Negasonic]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119217.0.html

34. NEW: The "Update Library (from tags)" tool runs in a thread and just updates the status bar as it works (instead of blocking the program).  A cancel button also appears in the bottom toolbar area.
35. NEW: The "Update Tags (from library)" tool was threaded the same way.

A beginning?

Nice. I wish I could test it. Hopefully the rest of the "Please wait..." scenarios will be looked at as well (Spinning up drive/Updating view/Removing tags... etc)

[fitbrit]

This has been a daily occurrence for me for years. However, I don't think it has happened after a fresh Windows install. It's only after many other apps are loaded that it does occur. I have Defender tamed and I still get this on my system. Getting to the core of the problem would make MC even more appealing going forward. Very few of my 100+ customers with MC installed ever see this issue, and those that do often have installed a load of different software packages.

[Matt]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119217.0.html
A beginning?

Nice. I wish I could test it. Hopefully the rest of the "Please wait..." scenarios will be looked at as well (Spinning up drive/Updating view/Removing tags... etc)

I'll get the remove tags feature next week.  Thanks for the idea.

[Negasonic]

Another scenario today:

After switching back to my Main Library, which is pointed to files residing in the cloud, I noticed that artist images did not show up. In options under 'File Location/Cover Art' I see that the path has been reverted to default location on the C: drive even though I had previously set it up, on this particular Library, to point to a folder in the cloud (P: drive). Off-Topic question: Does MC not save settings for each Library?

After putting in the correct path and clicking OK, MC immediately chokes up. The main screen becomes unresponsive and expands over the taskbar. Never saw any 'Please Wait...' popup.
After tabbing out of MC and minimizing windows I see there is a popup underneath: 'Please Wait... Moving cover art...'

I had no idea what that meant, since there was no cover art in the c directory to move. It never seemed to finish and I got scared it was messing things up so I had to force quit MC. Starting it up again everything was back to normal.

Testing MC with files in the cloud is a good way to expose MC's behavior when functions take a bit more time than it expects. This was yet another example of a 'Please Wait...' situation that made the screen expand when the popup window was not fixed on top of the screen.     

[Spike1000]

Used MC to rip 2 CDs this morning. I normally use dbPowerAmp on another computer but I thought I'd try MC. Anyways got the blue circle of wait and blurry screen 3 times during the process as I temporarily lost the task bar as the CD spun up/was being analysed. No issues during the ripping process itself.

Spike

[JimH]

Have you tried a Google search for Win10 blur?  Here's an example of what's available:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4091364/windows-10-fix-blurry-apps

[Spike1000]

Have you tried a Google search for Win10 blur?  Here's an example of what's available:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4091364/windows-10-fix-blurry-apps

Yes, there is a scaling issue that causes the screen to go blurry but scaling issue is because the task bar has disappeared and MC has rescaled itself to the entire screen area. It has nothing to do with the wrong resolution on a monitor.

Check out Negasonic's video of the issue: YouTube: https://youtu.be/0Pd5dvS5y_8 and have a read of this thread for reports of the situations within MC that can cause it for different people.

Spike

[Negasonic]

First: Thank you Matt for the fixes so far, did a quick test with 'Update Tags (from Library)' and it worked great. (The clickable Cancel thingy was covering up my toolbar icons in the bottom left side, though, not sure if the placement of this could be adjusted? No big deal.)

Another scenario today:

After updating to MC25 and playing a video for the first time, the dreaded downloading of AV codecs and LAV filters will start. Issues with this has been reported many times by different users, that it may take longer than expected for this to complete in a timely manner. For me, this time, it took about 3 minutes and during this time MC gets unresponsive if clicking outside the "Please Wait... downloading AV codecs etc etc" popup. Screen covered the taskbar and the "Please wait..." window was hiding underneath the main window until download was complete.