Force has recovered from an internal error

My Force has recently started to act up a bit, soft-crashing with the message "Force has recovered from an internal error". When this happens while a track is playing, the track will stop, and it takes about 5 seconds for the Force to be operable again for me to restart the track.

This is obviously a literal show-stopper for using the Force live, and we have a big live show coming up next weekend where this just cannot happen.

Any suggestions on why these crashes might have started happening, and any tips on how to make them go away again?

Some information about my setup: I use disk streaming to play back up to 8 tracks of audio, plus two MIDI tracks (one of them drives external DMX gear, the other one triggers external video gear). Aside from a maximizer on the stereo out, I don't use any internal Force effects, and while I play back the tracks I don't even touch the Force (I don't mess around with filters, faders or anything). It just needs to sit there and play back those 8 audio tracks and 2 MIDI tracks, and it used to do that flawlessly.

I haven't changed anything in the Force when those crashes started happening (aside from regularly replacing the WAV files that get streamed, which I've always done before as well).

I'm running the latest released Force firmware, and am streaming the audio files off of an internal SSD.

It’s been a while, but Preferences>MIDI>Program Changes = “Off” might help.

This was the only thing I could get to crash it every single time a few years ago.

Thank you, I'll try that!

Been messing around with changing a few things but those crashes keep happening. Wondering whether maybe something got damaged as the Force was shuttled back and forth between live gigs, so I just ordered a 2nd one and will load up my tracks on that, to see if this may be some sort of hardware issue. I'll report back on my findings - the Force is really not usable in a live context with these sorts of reliability issues.

If the fresh unit doesn't crash, it could still be a software issue, since the system disk will be new, and lacking the possible accumulated garbage that the old one might have. I'm not talking about file-system corruption but the Force software's own mess-ups it may have been doing to its own stuff.

I'm thinking about school classroom computers... One solution to keep them in usable condition is to overwrite the whole disk from a disk image every night.

I doubt it's a hardware issue (if hardware is broken, it's usually very obvious and not intermittent in digital systems), so that might very well be it.

I have been doing a lot of updating of samples (WAV files), and a lot of mixing tweaks, opening and then saving lots of projects, so something might have gone wonky with the storage.

I wish we had access to fsck on the Force storage to deal with any file system corruption, to at least exclude that from possible causes ...

What do you think, wild guess, where's the fault at

a) the same file systems that the whole internet runs on

or

b) Akai/Inmusic's application code

One of these you got for free and the other you paid for!

Update: I've given up on the Force, after a brand-new replacement unit showed the same instability/crashes, and I'm not even doing anything particulartly taxing on the device (streaming up to 8 audio tracks with no processing/FX, and two very light MIDI tracks to trigger external gear).

This is a toy, not a product that's fit for professional/live use.

I've moved over to running Cubasis on an iPad Pro instead.

Thanks for trying at least.

Mere playback of 8 audio and 2 MIDI tracks is not a very complex task, just about any device from smartphones to PCs should be able to handle that. As long as the application software doesn't crash.

Yeah, I was trying for sure. I've had the Force for 3+ years (bought it pretty much right when it came out), and then it just sat there until they added disk streaming to it (without which the Force was useless to me).

I spent countless weeks tweaking and trying to make my projects as simple as possible to maximize reliability, and Akai Support has been pretty much useless: Their response was "it shouldn't be doing that". Right. I knew that much...

I even recommended the Force to another band, and they've experienced the same crashes. I witnessed one of those crashes live during one of their concerts. Painful. So it's not related to either my specific device, or to the material I'm playing.

Like I said, this is a toy that's not fit for professional use.

Cubasis on the iPad Pro has been rock-solid for me so far. Let's hope it stays that way!

If both units had the same problem it may be something besides the Force like the SSD or just a corrupt file causing crashes just for being on the disk even if your not using it. To rule that out did you format your SSD & make a new Project or even copy 1 from a backup folder? Try it also with a different SSD.

The project file may be messed up & so you could loaf up that project than Save As a new Project with the same name to override the old or use a different name if you want to keep both for whatever reason.

If it's possible to get the unit to do that by using perfectly normal operations, and another unit as well, the product is not suitable for professional use. Software is a big part of the product.

I'm using the Force completely as a toy. I have fun with it, I make grooves, songs, beats, weird ambient stuff. It does crash sometimes, but because it's for having fun, it doesn't matter. Live realtime shows have very hard requirements, and a software application has to be really well made to suit that kind of use.

The Force's software has so many glitches in normal use that it is perfectly clear that the manufacturer does not care very much about fixing bugs. Some software companies have a culture where ALL known bugs are fixed before proceeding with new features, and Akai/InMusic is not one of them.

B-Wise wrote:If both units had the same problem it may be something besides the Force like the SSD or just a corrupt file causing crashes just for being on the disk even if your not using it. To rule that out did you format your SSD & make a new Project or even copy 1 from a backup folder? Try it also with a different SSD.

The project file may be messed up & so you could loaf up that project than Save As a new Project with the same name to override the old or use a different name if you want to keep both for whatever reason.

Yup, I tried to eliminate all of these possibilities. When I moved my projects over to a brand new replacement Force, I didn't even install a SSD in it, and just "save as" my projects onto its internal storage to eliminate SSD issues, and create fresh copies of the project files. No matter - exact same issues.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:If it's possible to get the unit to do that by using perfectly normal operations, and another unit as well, the product is not suitable for professional use. Software is a big part of the product.

I'm using the Force completely as a toy. I have fun with it, I make grooves, songs, beats, weird ambient stuff. It does crash sometimes, but because it's for having fun, it doesn't matter. Live realtime shows have very hard requirements, and a software application has to be really well made to suit that kind of use.

The Force's software has so many glitches in normal use that it is perfectly clear that the manufacturer does not care very much about fixing bugs. Some software companies have a culture where ALL known bugs are fixed before proceeding with new features, and Akai/InMusic is not one of them.

100% agreed. If this was a professional-grade product, they would, for example, send crash logs back to Akai to analyze the stack traces and see what went wrong. This is a basic software engineering thing that lots and lots of apps do (e.g. Cubase will send crash logs to Steinberg and I know that they *do* analyze those carefully and do something about those crashes). On the Force, we don't even have access to those dump files (after all, it's just running Linux inside) so we could do our own stack traces.

And - the thing shouldn't be crashing like that in the first place so frequently and so catastrophically.

I feel bad now that I have recommended the Force to other performers, and will be retracting my recommendation with a great big apology.

Cubasis on an iPad is the way to go, it's been rock solid for me so far, and was a breeze to set up - took me a few hours to go from knowing nothing about it to buying an iPad Pro, downloading Cubasis, importing my WAV stems and MIDI files, hooking the iPad up to an iRig Pro Duo combined audio/MIDI interface, and having my complete 45 minute live set running reliably and flawlessly, without crashes or glitches.

So that setup will be my new recommendation for people who just cannot afford glitches and crashes because they're playing concerts where there is money and a reputation on the line.

You shouldn’t save on the internal this causes many problems…