What are the biggest reasons, why certain bugs appear for only few of us?

[Heigen5]

Assuming that R12 users either have Win10 or Win11 on a PC, then probably that's not the biggest reason why certain bugs appear for few of us only?
So my questions is: What are the most typical reasons why certain bugs appear for some of us only? Hardware and their drivers?
By the way, my R12 experience is solid, but I've read how some users have some bugs and some others for the same release do not.

Anyway, what could we users do betterly from the Props' perspective, to help them to solve the bugs fasterly?
If they'd have our specs in the reasonstudios.com accounts of us, that'd maybe help already a tiny bit.
I remember that we used to have a specs section for some of ours specs in the past, but not anymore.
By the way, if a person A would have a bug and the person B as well, and their specs would be the same, it'd be pretty easy to collect troubleshooting data from the users, and suggest troubleshooting information to us then. That'd also save time for the Props, if they'd build certain kind of a auto-response ticket system, no?

Or what do you think?

[jam-s]

Imho different hardware and drivers are a major factor, but also different OS versions and patch levels, number of installed plug-ins, size of sample libraries, number of REs, display resolution, screen setup (multi-monitor, portrait/landscape/mixed, etc.), font/desktop scaling, active colour management, etc. all might cause some elusive bugs.

The best way for them to debug those is when people who properly report a bug then use the logging version of Reason to reproduce it and then give a detailed log to RS. That log also includes a detailed hardware survey.

p.s.: They added mandatory telemetry collection to Reason 12 to get a more detailed survey of the different user's machine configurations.

[Heigen5]

Imho different hardware and drivers are a major factor, but also different OS versions and patch levels, number of installed plug-ins, size of sample libraries, number of REs, display resolution, screen setup (multi-monitor, portrait/landscape/mixed, etc.), font/desktop scaling, active colour management, etc. all might cause some elusive bugs.

The best way for them to debug those is when people who properly report a bug then use the logging version of Reason to reproduce it and then give a detailed log to RS. That log also includes a detailed hardware survey.

Ah, the logs have a detailed hardware survey? Ok, cool.
Yeah assert bugs are easy in that manner, but some bugs don't produce asserts though.
Haven't looked into the beta forums for a long time, I think I still have a pass over there.

[deeplink]

The possibilities are almost endless. The best way to solve it is to have more (and more active) beta testers.

[Heigen5]

Think if there would be a bug testing computer, that mimics all kinds of other computers, to find all the bugs... ah well...

[deeplink]

Think if there would be a bug testing computer, that mimics all kinds of other computers, to find all the bugs... ah well...

Not sure if this is entirely possibly. I recall even RS going out to buy really old and dated machines just to test R12 on it - since many users don't have the newest and greatest PC's

[Heigen5]

Think if there would be a bug testing computer, that mimics all kinds of other computers, to find all the bugs... ah well...

Not sure if this is entirely possibly. I recall even RS going out to buy really old and dated machines just to test R12 on it - since many users don't have the newest and greatest PC's

Yeah, thought so too... But yeah, my Dell i9 seems to be rocksolid, even though I had some performance issues in the beginning. Turned out I had to turn off all the power saving mumbo-jumbos in the Win10. If nothing bad happens in the hardware part, I think I'm settled with this build for the next 15 years at least.

[Loque]

Just to paraphrase a typical developers answer when you tell him there is a bug in his software: "It works on my machine"...

Works On My Machine.jpg (19.91 KiB) Viewed 2783 times

[Propellerhands]

Funny I was about to report one bug, and as I was writing a topic, suddenly the bug stopped happening. The issue was with putting insert FX into MIX channel and then moving that FX out of channel. Couldn't do it. Then after 100 tries I managed to move it out. So at best, it's a half-assed bug which doesn't break a workflow, just something that what I consider a bad "style of workflow".

I used to put all FX inserts one after another bellow the instrument back in Reason 4.0.1 days and after upgrade I was still doing it, now try to re-learn the "proper way" so to speak.

[integerpoet]

The answer is simple: Software is vastly more complicated than you can imagine.

And that goes for everybody including software engineers. I've been one of those for decades, and when I try to hold the complexity of a modern pro app atop a modern OS in my mind all at once, my brain doesn't merely fail. It wails in agony before collapsing in on itself.

Bonus: the same is true for hardware, though hardware is at least by constrained by the laws of physics where software is constrained only by the imaginations of some very strange people.

It's amazing any of this stuff ever works at all.

[Tweak]

Disregarding software for a minute, as I agree there's so many things that can go wrong its almost not worth elaborating on. Even the same hardware applications can behave differently. Take my Mac for example, it was performing poorly, I couldn't open songs I'd worked on previously without hiccups. Then the screen on my Mac died, and I had a new screen fitted. The guy at the fix shop told me he'd found bucketloads of dust inside my Mac, and that he'd cleaned it for me. I got it home and like magic, all my old songs could play.

[integerpoet]

The guy at the fix shop told me he'd found bucketloads of dust inside my Mac, and that he'd cleaned it for me. I got it home and like magic, all my old songs could play.

Yeah, that's definitely a thing. Dust can cause thermal issues, interconnect reliability issues, and even short circuits with the right kind of dust. I used to periodically haul my computer to a gasoline station, unseat everything that could be unseated, blow everything out with the air hose (the one intended to fill tires!), and then re-seat everything. For a computer geek, this felt very low-tech and manly! I haven't done this in a long time, but also I haven't had a computer which needs to spin up its fans* and/or kept one on the floor and/or in a dust-collecting area.

* This is almost a lie. The Intel Mac on which I used to run Reason would occasionally spin up its fans, but I took that as signal that it was time to find a way to simplify my session because noise is noisy.

[jam-s]

The guy at the fix shop told me he'd found bucketloads of dust inside my Mac, and that he'd cleaned it for me. I got it home and like magic, all my old songs could play.

That's hardly magic, but only logical. When a lot of dust blocks the airflow of the cooling system the CPU overheats and throttles its performance down to not generate any more heat and thus not damage itself or burn down your house. After the cooling system was cleaned your CPU could go back to performing at full speed.

[crimsonwarlock]

That's hardly magic, but only logical. When a lot of dust blocks the airflow of the cooling system the CPU overheats and throttles its performance down to not generate any more heat and thus not damage itself or burn down your house. After the cooling system was cleaned your CPU could go back to performing at full speed.

To add to this, laptops tend to throttle CPU speed for several reasons. For example, to get more range out of the battery. My laptop looses one DSP bar of power (or gains one DSP bar when playing, depending how you look at it) when not on AC.

[Tiny Montgomery]

Not sure if this is entirely possibly. I recall even RS going out to buy really old and dated machines just to test R12 on it - since many users don't have the newest and greatest PC's

Yeah, thought so too... But yeah, my Dell i9 seems to be rocksolid, even though I had some performance issues in the beginning. Turned out I had to turn off all the power saving mumbo-jumbos in the Win10. If nothing bad happens in the hardware part, I think I'm settled with this build for the next 15 years at least.

Looks like you've answered your own question. Look at your own setup first before assuming you have bugs in your software.

The power saving on windows can be annoying but it's a key feature to get right if you're doing anything more intensive than browsing, typing Doc's etc. Your problem, imho, and the answer to your OP, is it seems you're more likely to blame an external agent when something goes wrong than consider you may have missed a key detail yourself.

[Heigen5]

Yeah, thought so too... But yeah, my Dell i9 seems to be rocksolid, even though I had some performance issues in the beginning. Turned out I had to turn off all the power saving mumbo-jumbos in the Win10. If nothing bad happens in the hardware part, I think I'm settled with this build for the next 15 years at least.

Looks like you've answered your own question. Look at your own setup first before assuming you have bugs in your software.

The power saving on windows can be annoying but it's a key feature to get right if you're doing anything more intensive than browsing, typing Doc's etc. Your problem, imho, and the answer to your OP, is it seems you're more likely to blame an external agent when something goes wrong than consider you may have missed a key detail yourself.

You misunderstood the point of this topic.
I wanted to start this topic to discuss bug-related stuff generally, not to troubleshoot anything related to my PC.

[Tiny Montgomery]

Assuming that R12 users either have Win10 or Win11 on a PC, then probably that's not the biggest reason why certain bugs appear for few of us only?
So my questions is: What are the most typical reasons why certain bugs appear for some of us only? Hardware and their drivers?

No I understand what you're trying to ask and my answer is that these issues (i.e. the kind of very specific issues raised on this board which seem to affect that user only) are usually down to the user or their setup. A genuine bug will affect a larger number of people and will likely be acknowledged by the creators at some point.

Said this before but it's important not to forget that this message board itself is a small number of self selected users and not representative of broader trends usually.

[Heigen5]

Assuming that R12 users either have Win10 or Win11 on a PC, then probably that's not the biggest reason why certain bugs appear for few of us only?
So my questions is: What are the most typical reasons why certain bugs appear for some of us only? Hardware and their drivers?

No I understand what you're trying to ask and my answer is that these issues (i.e. the kind of very specific issues raised on this board which seem to affect that user only) are usually down to the user or their setup. A genuine bug will affect a larger number of people and will likely be acknowledged by the creators at some point.

Said this before but it's important not to forget that this message board itself is a small number of self selected users and not representative of broader trends usually.

Ok. I understand that it's almost always a case of everyone's setups. One thing I would like to know is that, is there lots of codes that detect our setups to be able to fix something per user?

[rsnsnds]

Is there any possibility for them to use AI for bug testing purposes ?

They could maybe feed the AI with all the possible hardware and software configurations, and then let the algorithms run all the possible combinations

Writing this I just realized that it's possible for the AI software to have bugs, and they will have to debug the bug finder

I guess it's just the nature of software to have bugs and also that it's a matter of combinations: make all possible combinations and find out if a combination has any issues

[aeox]

Assuming that R12 users either have Win10 or Win11 on a PC, then probably that's not the biggest reason why certain bugs appear for few of us only?
So my questions is: What are the most typical reasons why certain bugs appear for some of us only? Hardware and their drivers?
By the way, my R12 experience is solid, but I've read how some users have some bugs and some others for the same release do not.

Anyway, what could we users do betterly from the Props' perspective, to help them to solve the bugs fasterly?
If they'd have our specs in the reasonstudios.com accounts of us, that'd maybe help already a tiny bit.
I remember that we used to have a specs section for some of ours specs in the past, but not anymore.
By the way, if a person A would have a bug and the person B as well, and their specs would be the same, it'd be pretty easy to collect troubleshooting data from the users, and suggest troubleshooting information to us then. That'd also save time for the Props, if they'd build certain kind of a auto-response ticket system, no?

Or what do you think?

Personally I think that the biggest reason why certain bugs appear for only a few of Reason users is mostly because of edge case scenarios.
Also, users pushing and "punishing" the software to and beyond it's limits. As they should! That's how the software is improved at the end of the day. (we can only hope, right? )

From my experience, it's always been extremely reliable. Though, I tend to baby it until I've proven to myself that I can push it further it certain areas. All of this has drastically changed or sculpted the way I make music with the program. For better or worse. Whenever sticking 90% with native+RE, I don't experience any bugs at all. Or at least I don't perceive certain things to be bugs, which others might perceive to be.

Certainly, I cannot speak for all but only for myself.