Entire screen turns black

[joshhansen]

Bug Description:
When I run Surge XT 1.3, installed either from the official .deb or compiled and installed from github main, the whole screen turns black, the exception being some individual UI widgets which happen to repaint and thus appear. Mousing over widgets sometimes triggers a repaint and thus makes them visible, but this only lasts so long before everything draws as black again.

Surge XT Version
1.3.0 x86_64
2-bit or 64-bit]

Reproduction Steps:
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Run the app.

Wait about 15 seconds.

See the screen turn black.

Mouse over some widgets. They may appear.

Good luck exiting the app! (The x button is still active, if you can find it.)

Expected Behavior:
The app should display fully, without drawing the entire screen black.

Screenshots:

Computer Information (please complete the following!):

• OS: Linux Mint 21.2 x86_64 Cinnamon
• Host: n/a
• Version: 1.3.0

Happy to provide additional information.

[baconpaul]

Hmm we’ve had a couple of paint glitches since 13 on some linux distros. Some questions

1. did or does 123 work for you (juce 6 vs 7)
2. Are you at 100% or do you have scaling on
3. X Wayland or x11?

I dev Ubuntu with Wayland off and didn’t see any problem so may be a bit tricky to work our

[mkruselj]

@joshhansen Could you please provide somethe additional context as per Paul's questions? Thanks!

[joshhansen]

Apologies for the slow response.

1. I'm getting the same issue with 1.2.3
2. Display scaling and font scaling are both at the default (100% and 1.0 respectively)
3. Looks like X11 (Xorg binary is running directly under the display manager)

I was previously able to run lower versions of Surge XT alright - the problem may have begun when I changed my OS to Linux Mint. I can't say that for sure though. I also upgraded my GPU at the same time.

[baconpaul]

Do any other plugins do this? dexed? vitalium? things like that?

[joshhansen]

@baconpaul

Do any other plugins do this? dexed? vitalium? things like that?

I can use plugins from within LMMS without any issues. Not sure if that helps. I don't use any of the software you mentioned, and I have only been using Surge as a standalone program, not as a plugin. I haven't seen the black screen effect anywhere else though.

I reproduced the error under the current main branch. I hadn't noticed it before, but when this happens, most of the icons in my Cinnamon task bar disappear, at last sometimes. Quitting the program doesn't fix it.

The same is happening under the prebuilt binaries for 1.3.2 as well.

It's a real bummer this isn't working - I'd be happy to provide further information if you have other questions or diagnostics I could provide.

[mkruselj]

Could you please try Dexed? The reason we're asking is because Dexed is also using the JUCE framework like we are. So if the same thing happens, the incompatibility stems from there and there's not much we can do about it. That's the curse of Linux distros where each and every one of them has their own idea of how things should be, leading to support hell.

[joshhansen]

Alright, I built dexed and it seems to run fine. I was able to load and play all 32 presets, and it sounds good. No sign of the "black screen of death" even after leaving it running overnight.

Which reminds me, the issue with Surge - maybe it's unrelated, but there's also an issue with the audio quality, where it skips frequently. It didn't used to do that.

Could it be there's a common problem slowing the rendering AND the audio?

If I weren't seeing the same thing on the official release I'd guess I was running a debug build.

[mkruselj]

General population of Surge users doesn't seem to have the issue with skipping frequently. This would be something in your audio chain, most likely (the driver, or somesuch).