Musescore crashes on opening

• Mar 24, 2015 - 16:55
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S2 - Critical
Status
closed
Project

When trying to enter musescore using any method, the window crashes, and locks out. I'm on Windows 8 and the 2.0 version


Comments

I'm on WIndows 7 Professional with 64 bit, the processor is AMD Phenom II x4 840. Musescore 2.0 downloads and installs but on start-up crashes and freezes everything, even the blue circle of death, the PC won't respond to the mouse and the cursor disappears. No problems with 1.3 (except that I get runtime crashes on large files). Ideas? Many thanks.

@MV:
Did you install one of the betas or the RC before?
In this case, you can try a factory reset http://musescore.org/en/node/35956

If you still experience the crash, you can try to do this (not guaranteed that it will work):
- go to the folder C:\Users\(your user name)\AppData\Roaming\MuseScore
(note that the initial part of this path can change depending on the language you are using in your Windows installation, and that the "AppData" is a hidden folder http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/show-hidden-files-and-fold… )
- open file "MuseScore2.ini" with a text editor (e.g. Notepad)
- change these lines:
showSplashScreen=true
showStartcenter1=true

to
showSplashScreen=false
showStartcenter1=false

- try to start MuseScore 2.0

I had the same issue with the beta and RC versions - the startup freezes and locks the PC, the mouse can't be used and no commands can budge the freeze. I uninstalled the beta and RC, thinking that it must have been something to do with their development status. It's now obvious that it's something more fundamental.

When it crashes, I have to re-boot and re-start the PC with the power button, which is less than desirable.

I can't find the Musescore2.ini. The Musescore.ini (which I assume is 1.3) can be located by following the instructions provided (it is in a folder called MusE) and it can be changed by Notepad - it does not show showStartcentre1.

The Musescore 2 file seems to be downloaded and installed, it's in the folder Program Files (x86), the icon is there, I've checked the properties.

Status (old) won't fix active

I've got a similar problem as MV.

I could install and use MuseScore 1.3 without any troubles. On release date I wanted to upgrade MuseScore to MuseScore 2.0 on my 16 PCs, I'm administrate. On 14 PCs (every PC is exactly identical) everything works fine, but on two PCs I could install MuseScore, but I can't start it: it's hanging on the startscreen and Windows told me that MuseScore doesn't react and terminates the application. I reinstall it and I start it in the compatibility mode, but it doesn't help. Installing the latest Nightly Build (MuseScoreNightly-2015-03-27-1124-a249aea.7z) doesn't help, too.

After these troubles I read this comments and tried to modify the MuseScore.ini after resetting MuseScore by using the -F tag and I've got the same result, as MV has:
"I can't find the Musescore2.ini. The Musescore.ini (which I assume is 1.3) can be located by following the instructions provided (it is in a folder called MusE) and it can be changed by Notepad - it does not show showStartcentre1.
The Musescore 2 file seems to be downloaded and installed, it's in the folder Program Files (x86), the icon is there, I've checked the properties."

Then there is one additional thing that makes be skeptical. In the TaskManager I saw msiexec.exe, although the installation is ready. Then I wait 20min, but this process is still running (on the other PCs this process terminates after installation as it should be). Therefore I created a log file of the installation: you can see it in the attachment.
I hope that this may help.

Attachment Size
musescore.txt 1.68 MB

Thank you very much for investigating the issue and sharing your insights with us moritzmoritz98. We'll take this issue as top priority and come back to you as soon as we have some ideas.

I have a similar issue - I have just installed MuseScore for the first time on my computer (running Windows 8). It seems installed fine but when I try to open the programme, it immediately crashes. I have tried uninstalling and re-installing to no avail.

Unfortunately not. We miss a critical piece of information. MuseScore is running in the vast majority of windows PC and on all developers PC so it's hard to find the culprit.

For those who can reproduce the issue, can you check this list http://musescore.org/en/node/36041 to see if it's not one of these cases? if not, can you try to run MuseScore with your firewall/antivirus off?

The problem doesn't appear to be related to any of the known incompatibilities. In addition to any Windows firewall, I use Webroot Secure Anywhere (and as backup Zonealarm) - neither of these give me a message.

vRazorsEdge reported a similar problem in another post http://musescore.org/en/node/54301#comment-253881

He/she stated: "Posted by vRazorsEdge on April 6, 2015 - 5:30am

I just installed musescore 2 for Windows 8, and it seems like the installation went fine. However, when I click on the shortcut to start it up, my computer just freezes after a few seconds. Do I need to remove the old musescore for this to work, or is there some other issue?"

A further post was made, indicating that the problem had resolved:
"Posted by vRazorsEdge on April 8, 2015 - 1:09am

When I deleted both and reinstalled MuseScore 2, it froze upon first try. When I restarted my computer, the shortcut icon was blank so I installed it one more time without deleting it. After that the program finally opened! You should try it this way, it's worth a try."

It's not clear that when he/she says "deleted both" that both 1.3 and 2.0 were both re-installed (can 1.3 be re-installed?) As you can see a description is given about a further re-install when a blank icon was noticed. I have tried to install 2.0 and beta (and RC) about six times without success (they all "appear" to be downloaded and I always have an icon). I have tried to re-install 2.0 without deleting a previous installation - it goes through a "repair" process but the problem remains.

OK. More tries. We will find the cause.

First try, run MuseScore without sound system to see if the sound system is the problem

  1. Open a command line: Press Ctrl + R and enter "cmd" without the quote, and press return
  2. Navigate to the MuseScore installation directory. Enter the following and press return
    cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\MuseScore 2\bin"
  3. Enter the following and press return
    MuseScore.exe -s

Second try, to rule out the packaging, can you try the portable version of MuseScore

Next try, I could cook a special debug version to investigate the crash.

Something that I did to fix it was to go into the appdata folder, roaming, musescore2. It should say musescore2.ini, but if it's not that, delete it. That's how mine started working again

@GhstyPrsn So you did manage to start MuseScore, but 10 minutes in, it crashed? Be as precise as possible as this will help us to understand what the exact problem is. Thanks.

I could get to CMD...Program Files (x86) but "\MuseScore2\bin" couldn't be found. The portable version also crashed the PC. Musescore2.ini can't be found in Apps Roaming (only Musescore.ini)

This time I got all the way to MuseScore.exe - s but nothing happened, the file didn't open. When attempting to open from the icon it continued to freeze. The Musescore 2.ini still doesn't appear in apps. Thanks for the ideas, so far. It's after midnight here - I'm off to bed.

The really big aspect which irritates me is, that all of the 16 PCs, I administrate, are hardwarewise completely the same! Softwarewise there should be the same, but it's not 100%. So it can't be a hardware problem. Furthermore we haven't installed an Antivirus and we only have a deactivated firewall. So this won't be the problem (and nothing of the Known incompatibilities).

Then I tried the suggestion by lasconic on April 9, 2015 - 12:42pm (#21). He/She thought that this is a problem caused by the Soundcard and he/she's right!!!!!

I opened MuseScore with a deactivated Soundcard (by the parameter s) and now MuseScore works without any troubles!!
After that I found out, that the two PCs, which aren't able to start MuseScore, haven't got a speaker yet. This means, that the other 14 PCs, which are able to start MuseScore, have got a speaker, but not the two problematic PCs. The standard speaker is the monitor (on this two PCs we forgot to plug-in the audio cable), but usually we use MuseScore with headphones. So in my opinion the check during the startup of MuseScore if there is an speaker available is not very well-thought, because if you have no speaker installed and then start MuseScore it crashes, although you are going to plugin headphones.

I think that this is the solution of the/my problem!!!

Concerning to this thread: It seems to me that we are talking about different problems with different occasion...

@moritzmoritz98 Awesome! There is no check in MuseScore to know if there are speakers or not. We just try to connect to the audio system and apparently the driver is not really nice. Can you tell the brand of your soundcard? Or the audio chipset of the motherboard if you don't have a ? Also the driver version?

Someone else reported the same problem (crash if speaker not plugged in). I still need to find the post again but I would like to compare the driver/hardware.

We haven't got a soundcard on the PCs. So this are the facts about my motherboard:
Manufacturer: Foxconn
Model: G31M/G31M-S (Socket 775)

I googled the audio driver of this motherboard and it is "7.1: Realtek® ALC888". The driver is the standard Windows one.

I hope that this might help and I'm glad that I can help you!

Why do you remark this as major?

A crash is by definition of MuseScore a critical bug!

See: https://musescore.org/en/developers-handbook/how-write-good-bug-report-…

"Any bug will have different priorities.
"Critical" is used if any of the following happens:
Data loss
Corruption
Score no longer opens
Inability to save work
Certain irreversible operations
Hangs and crashes
"Major":
Common feature incorrectly/not functioning"

Logicalwise this is a critical bug, too, because MuseScore crashes. Only for a few persons, but this is normal for a stable software. Otherwise there won't be any critical bug, because in a stable version (it is tested for 2 month!) there is no bug which crashes a program for the majority of the users. So any bug is a exotic one with an certain prerequisite. Furthermore is the aim of an issue tracker to make this program perfect and to eliminate all bugs and crashing reasons and not to say for 99,999% of all users everything works fine so any crashes aren't important, because only 0,001% of all users have these problem and it doesn't matter that they can't use the program! So I can't get your point/argumentation!

@Lasconic: "Someone else reported the same problem (crash if speaker not plugged in). I still need to find the post again but I would like to compare the driver/hardware."

Here, on the French forum : https://musescore.org/fr/node/52781

Sa configuration:
Win 8.1 64bit
intel i7 4790
MSI H97 - pas de carte son particulière.

En fait, pour la V 1.3, je n'ai rien remarqué. Quand je n'arrivais pas à ouvrir la V 2, j'ai ouvert la V 1.3 sans problème, mais je ne l'ai pas utilisé. j'ai pensé qu'il pouvait y avoir un conflit de fonctionnement entre les deux versions, aussi j'ai desinstallé la V 1.3. Je n'utilise cet ordi fixe que depuis peu de temps, avec des oreillettes qui naviguent entre le fixe et le portable.

Last night my antivirus (Webroot Secure Anywhere) alerted me that MuseScore.exe...MuseScore 2\bin was a risk,describing the risk with the terminology "W32.Malware.Gen". I allowed the antivirus to remove the program.

The one positive is that the antivirus could find the program even though I couldn't get it to respond to the command prompts last week. It would also seem to mean that the program could have a sleeping bug (this program was installed nearly a week ago - being about my fourth attempt to download a program that would open and not crash my PC - note my issues above) - no warnings were received on download and I've been on the PC most days since.

I believe my antivirus automatically scans on Mondays and that might be how it came to notice, however, why didn't the previous, problematical downloads also get noticed by the antivirus?

Is this antivirus report somehow related to the crash issue? Doesn't seem so. Better to ask questions in the forum first. Most likely, you simply need to inform the manufacturer of your antivirus software about this as a false positive - that they are incorrectly identifying a virus that doesn't exist.

Hi guys, been a while since I've been around the forums, but I still use MuseScore a ton!

Just recently updated my main system from snow leopard to Mac 10.10.3 Yosemite, and with that decided to go ahead and update some apps. Installed MuseScore 2.0 and... nothing. Starts up, freezes, crashes. Fresh restart, doesn't matter, can't do a thing before it crashes (well, technically I can click on the No button to say I don't want to recover the previous session that, of course, crashed). I'm intrigued though, because it looks cool hehe.
1.3 seems to still work fine on my new system. Nothing on the known incompatibilities list seems to apply. I'll check out some of the other thoughts in this thread, but I figured I'd post in the meantime since I'm on a Mac with this issue and all the others are windows I think.

Ok, more info on my problem specifically. Opening MuseScore 2.0 by clicking on a pre-made score (from 1.3) opened fine! The issue is actually Start Center.
So for me:
- open musescore 2.0 by clicking on app - Start Center automatically comes up - freezes, crashes shortly after
and...
- open existing musescore score, 2.0 app opens fine and appears to be working, unless... - select Start Center - freezes, crashes shortly after

After opening using an existing score, go to Preferences and uncheck Show start center. The app now opens fine just clicking on the app itself.

EDIT: I don't see anything in the issue tracker concerning Start Center issues... let me know if I should start a new issue for it, which I suppose may depend on if the other peoples' startup issues are also connected to Start Center.

Firewall isn't affecting it (tried allowing musescore specifically, and then just turning it off completely - no change).

I think we're getting somewhere with the terminal though: https://paste.kde.org/psp51ic79
Something about the (Q)SQLITE driver?

(side note: initially your \ in what you told me to type was confusing me, because I didn't realize there was a space afterwards, because it line breaks right there :P )

EDIT: realized it'd probably be useful for you to see what happens when I do select Start Center and it crashes: https://paste.kde.org/pjolx6tnb

EDIT 2: Just downloaded nightly. Applies there too.

Ok. SQLite is fine.
My guess would be a problem with one of the browser plugins as it's the last log message we have. Could you check if you are using ActiveGS and if not uninstall it?
Which browser are you using to go on the web? (Safari? Firefox? Chrome?) I can help you to check your plugins if I know which one you use.

Was that supposed to be if not install it, or if so uninstall it?

I have all 3 browsers on here, but Chrome is my default. I actually specifically recall attempting to install ActiveGS on Chrome, and like the majority of chrome store reviewers recently, it never worked. It is NOT listed in chrome://plugins/
Since it failed for Chrome, I Did successfully install it on Firefox.

Also, in case it's relevant to the plugin point, I did, since that time, update my OS. Still works in FF.

MuseScore is trying to load the plugin installed in one of your browser. My current guess is that one of these plugins is incompatible with the browser in MuseScore (StartCenter features a browser) and so crash. ActiveGS is a good candidate since it's the last message in the log, but it could be anything else.

Maybe you could try to uninstall ActiveGS from Firefox and see if Musescore can start?

In the meantime, I added a command line flag -w that will not load the web view of the start center. It will be in nightly soon and in 2.0.1 when it's release. If MuseScore loads with -w but doesn't without it, then we know it's likely to be a browser plugin problem. We can at least hunt it down and document the incompatibilities.

To disable the plugin library loading, we rely on Qt. So we need to wait for their fix.

Sorry for the delay.
Removing the plugin, and then even deleting the plugin entirely, has not changed the result of trying to open Start Center. The terminal is now trying to locate the DirectorShockwave plugin and failing.

Just installed 2.0.1. No difference, and the terminal result is exactly the same as well.

Just moved directorshockwave temporarily into the trash. Still crashes shortly after Start Center is opened. This time terminal doesn't say anything about any plugin. https://paste.kde.org/pcjtn9y0c

Great! If MuseScore runs with -w, it's definitely something with the webview. It would be great if you could list your browser plugins so we can try to identify the guilty one.

Would it be possible to add a checkbox in the Preferences to turn of the web view in the Start Center? I think I like it better that way—more room to display recent scores—and I remember there was at least one user who was very uncomfortable with the web view for privacy reasons.

Ok, back regarding comment 51.
I've tried disabling all plugins in all my browsers, but start center still crashes (if I don't do -w that is). Terminal has similar results, and does seem to still search for a plug-in that it can't find.

Now I tried temporarily throwing my whole Internet Plug-Ins folder in the trash. Start center still crashes, with similar results in terminal, but no indication of a failed plug-in search this time.

Given that, do you still want me to list the plugins?

No I guess it's not needed anymore. We can rule out the browser plugins, but still the webview makes MuseScore crash... Next step would be to run a debug version of MuseScore which can give us better clue about the crash. The debug version needs to be created though.

Here is a debug version for Mac (commit 9341f4ea4 ):
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxjayMZiuupObkx0OXctQW9nUFU/edit?pli=1
Actually, even a non-debug version is able under Mac to give a backtrace (even without line numbers), when it asks you if you want to send the information to Apple.
See for example here:
https://www.webkit.org/quality/crashlogs.html
With the debug version it also gives the line numbers.

In case their are needed, here are the instructions to use the debug version:
1- Open the dmg archive;
2- Extract MuseScore2_debug.app;
3- In a terminal shell, cd to the folder containing MuseScore2_debug.app;
4- launch ./MuseScore2_debug.app/Contents/MacOS/mscore -d
if you want a log file, use: ./MuseScore2_debug.app/Contents/MacOS/mscore -d &> logfile.txt
5- Reproduce the crash. Useful information is in the log file (or terminal output) and (even more useful information) in the crash log.

The v2 release version also crashes for me at the logo screen. Windows 8.1.
Note that the computer does not currently have speakers. (I was intending to use headphones or to remote the screen/audio from the office to the living room -- where the rehearsal space is.)

Attachment Size
MuseScore 2 crash.png 110.55 KB

Ah, in that case try a nightly build, a problem with not being able to initialize the sound system had been fixed recently on those (via this very issue here)

Well if all you need is the crash report that comes up normally, that's easy.
I'm not sure what all you need; it's really long and seems to include a lot of probably unnecessary info about my computer... so I cut out some of that: https://paste.kde.org/pa3vhetyv

I'm not sure what to take away from all that...

@ceegers:
Indeed, the most important lines are the first. The crash log is telling us that the culprit is the Facebook Photo Uploader plugin, which is not compatible with the newer OS for Mac (e.g. Yosemite). You can look at this thread https://musescore.org/en/node/38481 (unfortunately, the ehow.com link in that discussion does not work anymore).
You can remove this plugin by using the procedure given here:
https://serato.com/forum/discussion/1446337
(scroll down to the last posts), or here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes
(section "Facebook plugin (Mac OS X)" towards the end of the page.

Hope this helps.
Ciao,
ABL

Yup, that works, Start Center no longer crashes. Awesome!

Such a silly little bug on Apple's part...

Edit: heh, now I've got another minor bug as a result... in preferences, if continue last session and show start center are both checked, start center will NOT show up until you specifically choose it, even if your last session had no score open. Checking start empty (and show start center) does work.

Hello,
With 2.0.2, I have the same bug: freeze and lock out!

I tried: Portable version, -F and -w, launch as administrator, checked my anti-virus...

The same bug.
https://musescore.org/en/node/71476

I am on W8.1, 64 bits, HP BeatsAudio.

Months ago it was working very well on the same computer (previous version?), but from yesterday, the bug (due to update?).

Important: no musicscore.ini file ?! The repertory "C:\Users\José\AppData\Roaming\MuseScore" is empty!

Thank you for your feedback, José

hello,

I have the same bug on 2.0.2: freeze + Lock out.

On W8.1, HP BeatsAudio, 64b.
I tried: -F, -w, lauched as admin, and

what is strange, I do not have any musescore 2.ini!
C:\Users\José\AppData\Roaming\MuseScore is empty!

I downloaded 1.3, it works perfectly :)

Thank you for your feedback, José

This is the same problem I've had for the last 6 months or more (see my comments from April). I'm on Windows 7 Professional with 64b. I can't find the "ini" either. And it appears that, from 1st September, I won't be able to upload any of my 1.3 files.