Magic Music Visuals

I can't afford the full version of Magic, so I've been using the demo version. I've been using Winamp's AVS module for years now, and VSXu's interface is so bad it's almost unusable, so Magic has been a breath of fresh air for me. I'm not sure if there's any difference between the demo version and the full version besides the watermark and saving. I re-downloaded the demo not too long ago, so I believe I have the latest version of the demo, whatever that version happens to be.

I also can't find the bug-reporting section of the forums, so I'm posting this here.

I set up two monitors relatively recently, about a month ago. So far, I've had no problems, but recently I got hit with a BSoD when using Magic. I had Magic on my right monitor, with Discord and various other things on the left. By putting the visualizer into full-screen, something odd happens right off the bat; it goes into fullscreen on my left monitor, and it renders in 1920x1080 resolution, even though Magic itself is on the right. Pressing ctrl-F again makes it go fullscreen on my right monitor, but the resolution is whatever the resolution of the smaller window is (640x360 I believe), and it's just upscaled. The FPS counter and resolution info in the bottom left are both gone. Pressing ctrl-F one more time goes back to normal.

I pressed ctrl-F once, and had the visualizer open on my left monitor. I wanted to open snippingtool.exe (a screenshot tool built into Windows) to take a screenshot of my left monitor and mess around with some post-processing effects in Photoshop, but the moment I clicked on my right monitor, my audio started blasting at 100% volume (up from 15%) and started looping. I don't know how to describe the effect, but I'm sure you know what I mean. It's the type of sound you hear when something crashes. My right monitor looked like it was cut in half. Half of the taskbar + half the desktop was on the right half, and my entire desktop + taskbar on my left monitor was compressed horizontally by 2x and was on the left half of the monitor. My actual left monitor had strange discolored bars (they almost looked like the color of my task bars, but the color was definitely off) at the top and bottom, and I got the Win8 BSoD.

If I had to hazard a guess, it seems like Magic wasn't made with multiple monitors in mind. I don't really mind if it doesn't work well with multiple monitors, as I can just make the window fullscreen without pressing ctrl-F and giving it exclusive fullscreen (which seems to be the issue here), but the risk of a BSoD is something I definitely want to avoid. Hopefully this can be patched.

If I were to hazard a guess I would say your graphics card crapped out. See if you can reproduce it. I doubt very much it's a Magic bug. Check your event log to see if there's any record of the exe that crashed - also, if you catch it there's also an indication of what went wrong on the BSoD.

I use Magic with multiple monitors and multiple programs all the time and Magic has been the least of my problems.

Sadler wrote:If I were to hazard a guess I would say your graphics card crapped out. See if you can reproduce it. I doubt very much it's a Magic bug. Check your event log to see if there's any record of the exe that crashed - also, if you catch it there's also an indication of what went wrong on the BSoD.

I use Magic with multiple monitors and multiple programs all the time and Magic has been the least of my problems.

I did upgrade to a 380x recently, up from a GTX 760 which I previously used Magic with. The card has been used for mining before, but it's been used very, very lightly, and the 380x is a lot more resilient than the 380 in that regard. I've played a handful of high-end games with no trouble, and the BSoD occurred immediately after clicking on my other monitor, so I don't think it's my card. (note: I wrote this after opening the .dmp files; it looks like it might actually a driver issue. The drivers shouldn't be that old, though, maybe a few weeks at best)

The blue screen pointed to 3 error logs:
C:\Windows\Minidump\111816-97828-01.dmp
C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-163343-0.sysdata.xml
C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP

The second one appears to be gone. Perhaps I didn't get to it in time and it got wiped. I have hidden files and folders enabled and protected operating system files are also visible. There's a chance the space where the file used to be hasn't been overwritten yet, but I don't know of any software that could restore that for me. Maybe it'd be possible to find it again if I brought the HDD to a repair shop and told them the location of the file, but that's too much work for a log file I probably won't be able to get much out of anyway.

It took awhile (it turns out that the windows debugging software is actually bundled with the windows SDK and isn't shipped with windows by default, and it's also a pain to set up -- how fun), but I managed to open the .dmp files. It's really weird that visual studio can't open them. I usually attribute any weird file type that I can't open with regular programs and that's associated with Windows to be open-able via visual studio, but this was an exception.
Here's 111816-97828-01.dmp.
Here's MEMORY.dmp.
Hopefully there isn't any mention of my 1.4tb Skimpy-Penguins-in-Lingerie collection in either of those two dumps.

I'm not really sure what to make of the log files. I'll try updating my drivers and trying again (with my headphones off this time) to see if I can reproduce it. I might try and reproduce it before updating my drivers, just to see if it was a one-off type of deal, although I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen again and I'd rather not go through the whole shut down -> reboot sequence again.

It'd be interesting to see if this would have happened with my GTX 760, but I've already swapped that card out for mining and I don't think it'd be worth it. Plus, it'd take forever to re-install the drivers for both that card and the 380x when I eventually plug it back in.

Alright, I'll just update my drivers and give it another shot. And I'm sending this message before finding out since, you know, if a BSoD does happen, all this text will be wiped anyway.

EDIT: Already have the latest drivers, odd. Going to try and reproduce it. Recording it isn't an option for me, unfortunately.

Personally, I would stick with nVidia. Going from a GTX760 to R9 380x isn't a massive leap in performance.

EDIT: Already have the latest drivers, odd. Going to try and reproduce it. Recording it isn't an option for me, unfortunately.

Let me know if you discover anything. I think this is the first report in 4 years of a BSoD when Magic was running (except maybe when Spout was involved), so to me, it doesn't immediately seem like Magic is the problem. But you never know. Just make sure you aren't running any other apps so you can isolate the problem to Magic.

Personally, I would stick with nVidia. Going from a GTX760 to R9 380x isn't a massive leap in performance.

I agree. From my own experience, and from receiving much user feedback over the years, my observation is that Nvidia tends to be a lot less problematic than ATI/AMD. Not sure why.

I was auto-logged out and my text was erased. Wonderful.

My drivers are fully updated. I gave it another shot and it seems to be consistent. That said, the BSoD only occurs when I click the start menu; doing anything else works fine. I also have Classic Shell installed with version 4.1.0; the newest version is 4.3.0, but most updates have just been made to accommodate Win10, so I doubt there could be much that's been changed since then.

Sadler wrote:Personally, I would stick with nVidia. Going from a GTX760 to R9 380x isn't a massive leap in performance.

I have a lot of 380x's laying around. I was planning on installing a second 380x soon, which is why I made the switch.

My 760 was the cheapo 2GB version, so the 380x's 4GB of VRAM makes a huge difference. I might pick up a 1080 in the future, but for now, I think the 380x is plenty fine. I wouldn't be surprised if I ran into a game eventually that runs terribly on AMD cards; I know they exist, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.

EDIT: One more thing I forgot. I barely had enough time to write it down, but this is the error I got:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

So, even though the drivers are updated, maybe it does have something to do with it being an AMD card? Who knows.

Yeah, that error message almost always indicates a problem with the driver.

There are some things in Magic you can try which might let you get around the problem though. In the Window > Magic Window Options menu, have a look at these toggle options:
- Exit Fullscreen For Other Apps
- Re-Init When Exiting Fullscreen
- Double Buffering

Also, I'd always recommend that you run the Magic UI (the Editor Window) on your primary display, where your Windows taskbar is. Magic will always go fullscreen first on the primary display, so press Ctrl+F again to move the output to the secondary display. See if it helps any. You might also want to try disabling the Windows taskbar on the secondary display.