All Progress and Hands Assignments Deleted

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.
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0vS3A0WU
Posts: 2

Post by 0vS3A0WU »

PC v. 10.3.4075

I wake up this morning and launch Synthesia, and all my progress and hands settings are gone. Hundreds of songs arranged by hand are now reverted to default tracks and all progress is lost. The user profile progress notes that I've played thousands of notes (far fewer than actual), despite there not being a single custom song (from the many I had loaded and keyed) with completed data or with a playable hands assignment.

Synthesia absolutely DOES NOT save hands assignments when you press the "Back" key as clearly stated on the website. This can easily be tested by changing a hands assignment, pressing back, then closing and reopening the program. Synthesia does not seem to be equipped with even the barest auto-save functions.

I do not plan to sit here for tens of hours re-keying all the music to be played I keyed previously. If my data cannot be restored I intend to refund.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I'm sorry for the trouble.

This sounds like you're running into a rare data corruption bug that we've been tracking down for the better part of 7 years now. I suspect if you check your log file (hold Shift while launching Synthesia, click "Open Data Folder", open log.txt), there will be some warnings/errors in there about not being able to open (or save) data files.

It's intermittent, extremely rare, none of the people we've heard from seem to have anything in common (besides Windows) and we've never been able to reproduce it in-house. Every release or two, we'll take a shot in the dark and change something related to saving/loading, but so far it hasn't yielded any results.
0vS3A0WU
Posts: 2

Post by 0vS3A0WU »

Thank you for the explanation. I am dismayed that my bad luck with one-off program errors appears to have continued with Synthesia. Having already attempted a reinstall of Synthesia, I seem to be unable to access the old log.txt to confirm. The current log contains only today's re-install data.
Boopboop
Posts: 2

Post by Boopboop »

Is there a work around? It is pretty devastating to lose hours of your life setting hand and finger settings and losing them. It makes Synthesia unusable. I installed it onto my brand new laptop ( Windows, Acer) It makes sense that it's rare... because I have struggled to find help.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

To try and avoid the problem altogether (which I still haven't been able to track down), the plan is to completely uproot all of our loading/saving code and switch over to a database. The idea is that files are hard and SQLite is one of the only things people haven't been able to break because of how consistent it always keeps all of its information stored.

With any luck, that switch (occurring a little at a time each Synthesia update over the next few updates), will finally wipe this problem out for good.
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