interrupt command or option to escape a "hung" process

Question

I've recently (for a few days in a row) been having an issue where Kyma "hangs" and the only exit I've found is to force quit Kyma, which of course means I lose any recent work that hadn't been saved, and manually shut down my Pacarana. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have some sort of "interrupt" command (a keyboard sequence or something) that overrides everything (stops audio output; stop Kyma from doing whatever it was trying to do; maybe initialize DSP. etc.) Something that would allow a more orderly shut down or restart that might enable files to be saved. Maybe something like that does already exist and I just haven't discovered it.

Extra information: It happens when Kyma is playing something and I try to do something in the way of an edit. In one case I was playing a timeline and wanted to select a different VCS, in another instance I was playing a timeline and wanted to unlock the VCS. The most recent instance I was just playing a sound and I did a paste and "replace all" on a sound in a timeline that wasn't playing at the time.

Comments

Hi Mark, could you please email the Timeline to SSC? Or if you could capture a short video showing the circumstances or sequence of actions that lead up to this freeze and email that to us, we would like to figure out why this is happening.
Thanks!

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Thanks for the follow-up. I'll try to get to it soon. (no email on this machine)

Meanwhile ... am I missing an escape hatch that's already built in? Is there a way of interrupting Kyma; of stopping it from doing whatever it was in the process of doing. Even if it wouldn't help in the case of a true "hang," I would still *love* the ability to stop Kyma dead in it's tracks on certain common occasions. For example: I go to load a sound and discover that it requires a whole bunch of sample files that can't be located. I feel like there should be a way to tell Kyma to just skip the whole thing so I could go on with my session and do something else. Instead, I have to wait and click cancel, wait and click cancel... etc. Today went through that loop for maybe 3 minutes when I was just casually interested in exploring something on my hard drive from long ago. (Ack!) There's another situation that arises very often with a timeline I'm working on often these days. It requires about two minutes to load (lots of audio files). Several times a day, I'll hit play, then suddenly realize I meant to make a minor edit before playing again. But there's no way to call off Kyma from going through the entire loading process before I can make my edit.

Since I guess this thread feels like it's essentially turning into a "wish list," I might as well ask what it would take to give users the ability to change the font and/or the default font size. I would love to have bigger or less crowed text in the windows where I'm working on CapyTalk expressions.

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I like your thought Mark and I would agree. 'Stop Evaluation' from the Action menu seems to work in some cases but maybe not quite to the extent that we're hoping for. The Sound I played at KISS 2017 in Oslo references about 60k images on a disk that I don't use anymore. I want to revamp it but can't get inside the Sound to the parameter fields because Kyma wants to find the images, so I know what you mean.

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@Mark Cmd+[ and Cmd+] increase or decrease the font in the edited parameter field (or the icons in the signal flow editor).

Answer 1

Ctrl+U or Cmd+U is a way to interrupt whatever computation is going on in Kyma.

Comments

Great! Thanks!!!
I will try these out during my next session.

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Thanks ... these commands worked great tonight!

Meanwhile ... I'm feeling good about wrangling some simple CapyTalk expressions into a nice funky groove to add to my EABD performance next week.

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Thanks, very helpful!

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For those interested in hearing Mark's results, here's the program: https://eabarndance.com/schedule/
(Chi Wang, Kerrith Livengood, Allen Wu, and Mark Zaki (and possibly others?) are also on the program in case you would like to have a Kyma meetup in Jacksonville ;)