Hi,
I want to describe a non acceptable problem I've had in two critical situations. I think the process has been the same.
This has happened at the start of two different concerts. Before them, we had the sound check, playing some parts of the pieces. After that, I just put the tablet in sleep mode, without closing the app so it will be ready then.
But, at the start of the concert, I found that the tablet is not working. I can see the window I left opened, but the touchscreen does nothing. I can't do anything, neither in the app or out of it.
The solution for me was presssing the power button for some (long) seconds until it reboots.
This has been critical for me, as when it happened yesterday I was the soloist. I had to play the first piece by memory, and I has not pleased about that. I can't trust the app to play in concert with it if this can happen.
To be fair, I can't tell if the problem is caused by the app, by windows or by my tablet, but I've only had this problem with MobileSheets and not with any other app or program.
I hope you can check it as soon as possible.
Thank you!
I can confirm I had similar problems with my Surface Book 3 (dettached tablet).
The touchscreen was getting more and more irresponsive the longer I used it. I assumed it was more a Windows problem.
But indeed it was very annoying.
Let's try to investigate the cause.
I'm very sorry to hear that you experienced that issue at the start of two different concerts. I will certainly do everything I can to investigate this and figure out if there are any reliability issues that need to be resolved. I've certainly never seen my Surface Pro 4 lock up like that and be unresponsive, so I will need to figure out how to reproduce what you are seeing. If it's a Windows problem (i.e. display driver issue, issue with the graphics device being lost temporarily, etc), then obviously I may not see it, but it's hard to determine that. The fact that you couldn't even drag down from the top of the screen to access the title bar to exit the application or drag from the other sides to multi-task or access the pull-out on the right side means Windows as a whole was probably frozen. MobileSheets is currently utilizing Win2D for drawing things on the screen which is going to use whatever graphics chip or card you have in the device. This may expose issues you wouldn't see with other applications that may be handling rendering differently. If you've used applications that are doing 2D/3D drawing and have never encountered this kind of issue, then there is definitely a relationship between what MobileSheets is doing and whatever stopped the OS from working. Any information you can provide in helping to reproduce and figure out the issue would be appreciated. Do I just need to try leaving my tablet asleep for periods of time and then loading it to see if MobileSheets or the OS has stopped working? How long was the tablet asleep? Do you utilize the metronome or audio player, or were you just strictly viewing songs? This will help me narrow my search. Also, were you loading individual scores or an entire setlist? Were there any applications open in the background?
Thanks,
Mike
Okay, let's see.
- It has never happened with one note or drawboard. Idk if those use the same drawing system as yours.
- In both cases, a setlist was loaded.
- In both cases, the device was asleep for about 20 minuts or more.
- metronome or audio player were not used in neither sessions.
- MSP was the only app being used. Maybe google drive at the background.
- As you said, I couldn't drag with the touch commanda to minimize the window and open the multitask options. This was in fullscreen mode, so the taskbar was not being displayed.
If you need anything else, I'll provide everything I can. Thank you for yoyr effort!
What is the timeout before windows hibernates?
Try increasing it? (or decreasing it to test if it happens quicker)
Geoff
It dosen't hibernate. I've set it that way just in case it happens when it shouldn't and I have to type the password in a bad moment. Just sleep.
Check the sleep timeout?
Geoff
My surface pro 7 is almost never failing me when going out of sleep mode. I use face recognition at start of concert and it brings me directly to mobilesheets with setlist loaded. On some rare occasions in the past I found the app not responding after bringing it back from sleep mode. However I could always drag down from top to access the right x to close mobilesheets and then restart it. My worst nightmare is that the computer freezes, pedal stop working or battery dies during concert so I can understand your frustration. Try reproduce it and then attach the keyboard and see if you could alt-tab or ctrl-alt-delete or ctrl-shift-esc. Couldn't you close the app after dress rehearsal and then open it when concert starts? The most recent setlist is just one click away. If you keep screen on with mobilesheets running, is it ok then?
Hi again.
It happened to me again the other day, but this time I tried to attach de keyboard. I could use the device with it, but only with it, so windows wasn't dead, just the touchscreen.
Anyway, this has happened to me only when using MSP and not with other apps. Might be a coincidence... but is strange when I can count 5 times.
I hope this extra info can help you out.
The difficulty is in reproducing the issue. I've tried letting the tablet sleep and opening the app every 20 minutes, but it's been responsive for me every time. So I can't determine if this is a problem in MobileSheets itself, something with Windows or display drivers (due to the use of the Win2D library which utilizes DirectX) or something else altogether. I'm also using a Surface Pro 4, so I don't know if the same issues will occur as on the Surface Pro 7 or the Surface Book 3. It would also help to know how many users are seeing this issue, because I still don't know how prevalent it is.
One major difference with MobileSheets vs other apps is that MobileSheets is a UWP application so it has to deal with the lifecycle stuff which is only applied to UWP apps. Microsoft is pushing hard to allow older Win32 apps to have access to modern frameworks, and this seems to be their focus vs improving UWP. So what I may wind up doing is converting MobileSheets to be a regular desktop/Win32 app so that I don't have to deal with all of the limitations of UWP. I don't know if it would fix this issue or not, but it could help depending on what is causing it.
I'll keep working to try and reproduce this issue, but if you have any recommendations for things I should try, please let me know. If you want to provide me with your library through a backup file, or at the very least an exported setlist, so that I can test with setlists that are known to have issues for you, I will give that a try.
Mike
Mike,
Just to chime in on this problem and maybe give you more information, I have had this problem on my Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10, and my Surface Laptop Studio running Windows 11. I have both of them set up to never time out, and to hibernate when I close the cover. So the scenario for me has been that I close the lid with MobileSheets up on the screen, and later when I open the Surface, MobileSheets is non-responsive. At this point, I can pull down the top system bar (whatever it's called) and use the X to kill MobileSheets, and then reload it. This had not caused me a problem, because I always set up a couple of minutes before I play. But I can see how that might surprise you if you didn't know about it.
So I would need to hibernate the device while MobileSheets is running and then wake it up again to see the issue with MobileSheets? I don't think my Surface Pro has hibernate enabled at the moment, but I can try enabling that to see if that helps with reproducing the issue.
Thanks,
Mike
I'm not sure that's essential to reproducing the problem. I'm just telling you how mine is set up. BTW, to get hibernate, you have to go into the power settings and near the top of the screen there's a link that says to let you change stuff that's not shown. That includes hibernate.
Hibernate and windows have never functioned really well if active programs are running and need to continue after hibernation ended.
I have been doing a bit of testing with hibernate, and after the device is turned on with MobileSheets up, I haven't seen any issues so far. So I'm no closer to understanding what is happening for some users.
Mike