Synthesia Video Creator Crash?

Trouble with Synthesia, your keyboard, or adapter? Think you found a bug?
When describing problems, always mention your OS and game version (shown at the bottom of the title screen).

If your keyboard has USB or MIDI ports, there is a tremendously high chance (>99%) it will work with Synthesia. See what you'll need on the keyboards page.
Post Reply
MyPianoMusic
Posts: 2

Post by MyPianoMusic »

Hello,

I've been using the video creator for my videos a lot recently, and while it works well 90% of the time, whenever I try to create a video of some MIDI files, the creator crashes like 2 seconds after pressing "export". It hangs at "Exporting raw audio from MIDI song" and then the program closes.
Now, I know the video creator is outdated and unsupported, but I was wondering if anybody knew a fix/cause for this anyhow since it seems to be happening with only certain MIDI files.

Greetings, Ruben.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Hard-to-track-down crashes were among the main reasons I couldn't keep supporting the tool. There were three new things that it uses that Synthesia itself doesn't (the cross-platform UI framework wxWidgets, the audio/video file format writing components, and an "offline", open-source synth called "Sonivox" that was originally designed to play MIDI ringtones on 2000's-era feature phones).

I was seeing crashes from all three of those, which effectively means they were out of my hands. I didn't have the development bandwidth at the time to try to track everything down.

These days, once I have a chance to dust everything off, I was planning to roll the video creator right into Synthesia itself, removing the need for wxWidgets. Since then, Synthesia has also incorporated a much more reliable, still-supported, (and easy-to-use) MIDI synth called BASSMIDI. It is also capable of doing "offline" audio rendering and the results are an order of magnitude higher quality than from Sonivox. And the audio/video components were already going to be switched over due to popular request for MP4 files.

Since some of that writing was already on the wall at the time, I simply abandoned the existing tool instead of trying to keep it limping along. When the new version rises from those ashes, it should be a lot more capable and a lot more reliable. (These activities are currently scheduled to take place after the Synthesia 11 task list is complete, unfortunately. I've been promising Synthesia 11 since before the first version of the video creator was released, and I'd like to fulfill that obligation first.)

All of that said, if the crashes are 100% reproducible given a particular MIDI file, I'd be happy to take a look to see if there is anything strange going on in the file. Feel free to send MIDI files to support@synthesiagame.com and I'll take a look.
Post Reply