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Topic: Support forum rules (Read 53564 times) previous topic - next topic
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Support forum rules

Please read these suggestions before posting a support question.
Following them will allow others to understand your problem better and provide a solution faster and with less additional questions.

1. This forum "Support - (fb2k)" is for issues with the main application itself and official (bundled) components only.
Issues here means problems or suspected problems. This does not include things that are clearly working as designed but that you just dislike. "How to?" questions, feature requests, and other general topics should be posted to "General - (fb2k)". Issues with 3rd party components go to "3rd Party Plugins - (fb2k)", where individual components usually have their own topic. If you really don't know what component is causing the problem and think it might be related to a first-party one, it is acceptable to post your thread here, and it will be moved by a moderator if necessary. This is an allowance for situations in which there is a lot of uncertainty, not a free pass to post in Support without thinking and give the staff the work of placing it in the right place for you.

2. Use the Troubleshooter to check for known problematic components.
Use the Help > Online Troubleshooter feature from the main menu to determine if any of the components that you have installed are known to cause problems. See also this sticky topic.

3. Make sure you are using the latest version.
Check the official site for foobar2000, or the official component repository, author's website or forum thread for 3rd party components. If you do not want to use latest versions for some awkward reason, your report is probably useless and will be ignored. If there is a beta version of the upcoming release available, it's a good thing to check its change log or try it directly, as the problem you are having might have been already resolved.

4. Describe your problem exactly.
Write in detail what specifically you were trying to do, what you had expected and what happened instead. In case of a sudden crash, try to recall what you had been doing just before it occurred. Try to reproduce the problem and write the result. If the issue you are having falls into one of the categories the appendices in this post deal with, you can use them to gather more details.

5. Post other helpful information.
That means usually at least your versions of foobar2000 and Windows, a list of all your components (there is a handy button in the top right corner of "Preferences > Components" which automatically puts it into the clipboard - please use codebox tags around the list so that it doesn't make your post unnecessarily long - "Toggle Side Panel > Insert: CODEBOX" in the post editor), contents of the foobar2000 console (can be shown from main menu > View > Console) and any other relevant information, like:
  • which music file types were being used for decoding/tagging problems,
  • which output method you have set in the Preferences and the identity of your hardware for problems with sound/playback,
  • describe your user interface layout for UI problems,
  • etc.

6. If the application crashed, make sure to click [Send Report] in the "foobar2000 has crashed" dialog.
Important information about it will be sent to the developers for further analysis, see also crash.foobar2000.org. This way, you can also immediately get a message stating the cause and possibly a solution for your problem in some cases.
(If you are a developer and want to get collected crash log data about your component(s), contact the staff.)

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Appendix A – How to debug high CPU usage

  1. If you don't have it already, download Process Explorer from Microsoft and start it. It doesn't need any installation, you might even use the "Run Process Explorer now from Live.Sysinternals.com" link.
  2. Find foobar2000.exe in the process tree - verify that it is taking CPU time in the relevant column.
  3. Double-click the foobar2000.exe line, a dialog with details about the process opens. Go to the tab called "Threads".
  4. For each of the threads shown with suspiciously high CPU usage, you can do the following:
    a/ If the "Start Address" column contains name of a component which could be the cause, you might already know the culprit. For example, seeing foo_vis_awesome+12345h would hint towards a resource intensive visualization component. You might still copy stack trace and send it to that component's developer to provide a better bug report - see below.
    b/ If the thread's "Start Address" is in a generic form like foobar2000.exe+12345h or just doesn't point to anything directly, double-click on each of the threads and post their stack traces in a codebox to the relevant forum thread. Note the [Copy] button in the "Stack for thread..." dialog copies only the selected lines - please make sure to select all of them before copying (press shift+end, or shift+click on the last line, etc.).

Appendix B – How to debug a deadlock

= application hangs up indefinitely or for several seconds, freezing the UI or blocking other progress
  1. Follow appendix A above to point 4/b, copy stack trace of all threads, post in a codebox.

Appendix C – How to debug filesystem operations or process-related issues

  1. If you don't have it already, download Process Monitor from Microsoft and start it. It doesn't need any installation, you might even use the "Run Process Monitor now from Live.Sysinternals.com" link.
  2. Follow the reproduction scenario up to the point before something bad happens, then clear the Process Monitor window (toolbar icon with the gum) to capture only the relevant information (Note: You might be asked to do it differently later if needed.)
  3. Perform the actions which result in the buggy behavior.
  4. Stop Process Monitor capture (toolbar icon with the magnifing glass).
  5. Save the log to the native PML file, pack it to a ZIP archive or similar (it will compress pretty well) and upload here to the "Uploads - (fb2k)" forum or wherever, then post a link.
  Note: Naturally, you can filter the Process Monitor log for unrelated background processes filling it with nonsense etc., unless the issue being debugged is some weird sharing violation problem between multiple applications.
Full-quoting makes you scroll past the same junk over and over.