@CDEFGAB wrote:
Hello,
Quite some time has passed since Hookpad 2 was released, and there are some performance issues and some pretty frequent bugs that I find hard to believe no developer has encountered. I run into them very frequently. These happen both in Chrome and Firefox.
Play/pause and looping. Very, very buggy in general. I can’t even count the amount of times that the play/pause cycle gets “stuck” in playmode when nothing is actually playing, and viceversa. It’s especially frequent when controlling play/pause with the spacebar, and also when looping is enabled, forcing you to grab the mouse and manually click the play/pause button a bunch of times until it regains it’s sanity.
Magic chord/magic bass. Very useful features, especially magic bass, but again very buggy. The auto-playing preview mode, which can’t be disabled as far as I can see, messes up the play/pause cycle really frequently, going as far as forcing you to save and reload the page to be able to continue working, because it gets the song stuck in pause mode or in a paused play mode that you cannot get out of. Also, magic chord sometimes reports “no chords found for this chord-scale combination” for very common combinations, but when you refresh the page and try again, it actually finds them. If for some reason it doesn’t manage to communicate with the API, it should say so, instead of misleading you into thinking that it did a search but didn’t find anything. Makes you second guess the message and forces you to refresh to see if it’s actually true this time.
Inaccurate clicking. This one is especially infuriating if you like to rearrange stuff with the mouse, and it was also present in Hookpad 1. Clicking with the mouse to select and/or drag notes and chords, a lot of times simply doesn’t register or registers incorrectly, selecting instead nearby notes that weren’t clicked, or notes that are far away, or simply not selecting anything at all. I’m talking about stuff that is sometimes 15-20 pixels away from where you actually clicked. Very frustrating.
Any kind of mouse dragging actions, whether they’re about repositioning notes, resizing them, repitching them, etc. is a huge performance drain. It slows everything down to a crawl. It feels as though the redrawing rate of the app drops tremendously, and any kind of soft, nuanced interaction becomes really sluggish and inaccurate as a result. I’m using Hookpad with a i7 4790K CPU, it’s not exactly a slow computer.
Audio playback of the virtual instruments is sluggish. I just use the piano, I don’t even use complex mixing arrangements with lots of different virtual instruments. Notes get “stuck” frequently and it generally feels as though they have a hard time keeping up, especially when using polyphony and complex arrangements, leading to frequent of mis-timed note playback and audio clicks. This compounds with the play/pause bugs, which frequently lead to notes getting stuck in “on” mode, leading to stuck, infinite piano notes that only stop playing when resuming playback.
All of these issues are very, very frequent. They’re constant annoyances when working on any kind of arrangement. Is anything being done about them? Like I said, it’s been a long time…
I appreciate the efforts at any rate.
Edit: I’ve noticed a significant amount of the slowdowns take place when mousing over a chord or note and the resize “handlebars” overlay appears. Not even clicking, just hovering causes a huge slowdown. To reproduce it, simply arrange any number of 1-measure chords in a row, play the song, and hover the mouse over the chords back and forth. Watch how the playhead starts getting stuck all over the place. Something strange is going on there.
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