Kyma freezes after Mac goes to sleep

Question

Tonight I left my Kyma 7 system (with a Pacarana) running and did some other stuff for a few hours, then came back (my Mac had slept its screen inbetween). I'm using a MOTU mk3 828, and firewire 800, with a firewire 800 to thunderbolt connection my 27" iMac Late 2012 (running MacOS 10.14.5).

When I got back, all Kyma's windows were completely blank, and I coudn't interact with it. I notice the Pacarana periodically starts and stops its fans... but this seems kind of like normal operation. It's responsive via its front panel just fine, but I can't even quit the Kyma app.

Has anyone else had this happen?

Comments

I should mention, given how symbiotic the pacarana and kyma software are, I'm generally loathe to hard restart the software, but I actually had to do that just now to get it to come back. Kind of disappointing. I hope it automatically sends a crash report to SS or something.

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I think you should be fine rebooting Kyma 7 and Pacarana. If you "Force Quit" Kyma 7 there will be no damage done to the Pacarana.

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Yeah, as I said in the comments below, I *did* restart both. I had little doubt it'd be fine for the hardware, and assumed it'd be fine for the software (restarting software that's writing to disk is almost never a good idea). It'd be *sort of* fine if Kyma (the software) kept its state (and reinstated that of the pacarana) on reboot as many MacOS apps do these days, but it doesn't.

Answer 1

While Kyma is open, it's continuously communicating with the Pacarana. That's why Kyma prevents the Mac or PC from going to sleep. If Kyma is open, it's best not to force your Mac to sleep (otherwise Kyma gets confused and unhappy... as you just experienced).

Comments

Thing is, I didn't force it to go to sleep... the screen is the only thing that goes to sleep (after 15 minutes), and I've got "put hard disks to sleep whenever possible" but the computer sleep is set to never... so i'm not sure what's going on. Kind of annoying. I guess the only solution is to force quit kyma whenever this happens, or just turn kyma off between sessions. Not great.

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You should refine the question above, if your OS X computer is set to never sleep. It should be ok for you to reboot Pacarana and Kyma 7 application. Both of them are very robust and I don't think rebooting is an issue, if you have saved your work.

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> You should refine the question above, if your OS X computer is set to never sleep

Thanks for the advice. At the time I didn't know what the setting was (sleep or only screen sleep). My main point would be... this is normal operation of my computer... so I shouldn't *have* to care. I think it's a legitimate issue if I'm using my computer within the usual bounds of computer usage and Kyma stops working. In any case it's not a *massive* problem, just something I have to work around and be aware of for now.

Answer 2

A possible work around would be to use one of the "keep awake" utility applications:

• Amphetamine, available for free on the Mac App Store - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12
• macOS's built-in caffeinate command line program, which can be run from Terminal, or by extension, as a Shell script which also launches Kyma - https://github.com/seamusdemora/seamusdemora.github.io/blob/master/MacStuff.md#2-how-do-i-prevent-my-mac-from-sleeping-. Run man caffeinate at a Terminal prompt for more inforation.

Comments

Thanks! I hadn't heard of caffeinate before — seems oddly whimsically named for a Mac command line program ;-) Apologies for not being clearer, but my Mac's *processor* was set to never sleep, it turns out (I use the machine to serve media as well in the background), so it was only the screen that was sleeping. I think for now it's something I"ll just have to live with. I guess others *do* have this issue, they're just living with it :)