BeatBuddy Manager (BBM) crashes in Catalina

BBM crashes immediately upon opening now on MacOS Catalina - it used to work, then 2 weeks ago, blamo, I cannot access or edit anything on the pedal (almost 100 songs) and I use it at church every weekend. Support gave me one recommendation, which of course did not work. And now our praise team is stuck. Really disappointing. Hopefully we can limp along re-using songs already done and stored in the pedal until a stable version comes out. If not - it’s back to a drum machine. Very frustrating

See if anything in this post will help. Mojave or Catalina: how to get the BeatBuddy Manager (BBM) installed and working

The BeatBuddy Manager (BBM) works well for me in Mojave and Catalina (when I’m working in Catalina).

Your problem is all the more troubling since you’re also reporting that you are unable to access or edit any files on the BeatBuddy (BB) pedal. Usually these symptoms could be caused by using a special character such as a period (.) or other special character to name beats, songs or folders in your BBM project. If song names or folders have been misnamed, it corrupts users’ projects.

Hopefully you have a backup SD card with a good project still on it. If not, a backup SD card is cheap insurance for performing musicians.

The only thing I would suggest is that you delete the BBM software as well as your bbworkspace folder and to reinstall with a freshly downloaded copy of the BBM and follow the instructions in the link I provided above.

If you’d like, I’ll be more than happy to try and determine if your project can be restored. You may contact me via private message (PM). No guarantees, though.

I moved your post to a new thread.

Thanks - actusally I had ferreted out those same instructions earlier from the forums and tried it. I was able to get by the Apple security issues when I tried the re-install by using them. However, once I was by those, when I started the program is crashed immediately still.
So this AM I am cleaning the files out, deleting the program, moving and renaming my BBWorkspace (with the files I want to save) to an external drive, re-downloading BBM and re-installing. I will let you know if that works. If I can get the program to come up with a fresh install and empty BBWorkspace, I am sure we can get back in business. Step at a time! I have the pedal here at home now, but I am not even connecting it. I want to pretend I have never used BBM before and see how it goes.

Update - well, that did not take too long.

I reinstalled, got by security by allowing BBM to run anyway, and as soon as the UI filled the screen, it went away and I got the obligatory crash info. I have sent this previously (the whole thing) to support, but this is just the top half showing the crash.
Note - I had moved and renamed the BBWorkspace off to an external drive, deleted the folder and the application BBM, then rebooted and re-downloaded BBM and installed it from scratch, just like a new user. Same thing happens. Also not, I have tried this on my wife’s laptop (which is on Big Sur) with the same result. It had never run on her computer previously. My iMac is 8 years old and I cannot use Big Sur anyway, I am topped out on Catalina, which did work until about 2 weeks ago.Then this started.
So I am thinking it must be due to some change in a recent update to Catalina, since neither my BBWorkspace nor the pedal were connected to the computer during startup.
Last hing I could try is connecting the pedal and see if that helps the UI stay up.
I will also use the Terminal process to add the open anyway flag to System preferences and see if that helps.
Process: BBManager [1960]
Path: /Applications/BBManager.app/Contents/MacOS/BBManager
Identifier: com.mybeatbuddy.BBManager
Version: 1.6.4 (1.6.4.0)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: BBManager [1960]
User ID: 502

Date/Time: 2021-03-01 10:51:14.607 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.15.7 (19H524)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: CAD9B53D-3AB5-7F80-9AC9-2E3CB021437E

Time Awake Since Boot: 1300 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000028
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process: exc handler [1960]

VM Regions Near 0x28:
–>
__TEXT 0000000100b32000-0000000100fc5000 [ 4684K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /Applications/BBManager.app/Contents/MacOS/BBManager

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Tried running the BBM from Terminal - that way you get some feedback on the process
This looked interesting

workspace: true QDir( “/Users/M/Documents/BBWorkspace” , nameFilters = { * }, QDir::SortFlags( Name | IgnoreCase ) , QDir::Filters( Dirs|Files|Drives|AllEntries ) )
QMetaObject::connectSlotsByName: No matching signal for on_sourceEdit_returnPressed()
slotCleanChanged true
exiting slotCleanChanged
SongTracksModel::trackAtIndex - ERROR 1 - track at index 59526 does not exist (mp_SongTracks->size() = 4 )
Segmentation fault: 11
logout

Problem is- this is a clean install from scratch, how could anything be missing? I also now have the pedal connected. On that SD card is a copy of a Christmas project, I double-clicked on it and it tried to open the BBM, but it went away as well. I think I am pretty much out of options at this point. I will try one more time to add the “open anyway” option to system preference via Terminal commands, so see if that helps at all. Will let you know soon

Ok - I guess that exhausts it - I have disabled the security for 3rd party developers, and the same result happens. I will re-enable it for now and see what support or anyone else comes up with.

So at this point - I have a clean install, with newly installed BBWorkspace, but BBM still immediately crashes upon starting it, regardless of how I try to open it (ctrl-click, or not, or via Terminal).

SUCCESS - trial and error but SUCCESS anyway!

So I tried to open files directly from the pedal (SD card), double-clicked a song, would not work, so I tried to reopen the project that was stored on the SD again (I had tried that earlier with no success).
It worked! loaded the project and gave me the option to save it to disk, I said yes and it saved it to disk and synched the two together for future use.
I just tried a song and it played fine! The only thing it is missing are the 5 songs from last week (in the saved and moved BBWorkspace) because I never got the chance to save them to the pedal before the crashes began. But I believe I will just delete those old workspaces I had moved, and just re-do those songs in the future from scratch. Although it does not explain why the program crashed with a clean install, the old files somehow possibly played a part initially. Right now I do not feel like trying to import each one just to see if it crashes again! Maybe when I am bored I will try it.

So - bottom line
Completely delete installation and BBWorkspace
Completely clean install
Set Apple security via Terminal to return the option for “any developer” in Gatekeeper
Connect SD card and open last good project from the card - UI should run
Agree to the option to copy project to disk and synch for future use.
Test it out.
I need to see if I can reset the overall “Any developer” setting and just use the cntrl-click Open if needed in the future. right now I want to run this for a week to see if it remains stable. Then I will turn the security option back on.
Thanks for your suggestions and help. Hopefully an ymore posts will be good ones!

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Thanks for keeping us updated and especially for the crash log details. Please make sure you use the SD slot reader.

If you ever get really bored, see if you can get it working on the wife’s Big Sur sled. :grin:

righto - will do - or I will tell her I HAVE to have a new sled of my own! HA
Thanks again

I’ve been an Apple fan for 25 years. I have never had so many problems as I’ve had with Big Sur on my MacBook Pro. I got kernel panics while working, at least once every day. I initially re-installed following a full wipe and install, then switched back to Catalina. After another Big Sur update, I tried installing it again with the same kernel panics. I did another clean wipe and re-install of Catalina. I will skip Big Sur it on my critical iMac and MB Pro. I have Big Sur running on my Mac mini, but that does almost nothing but share music through the house.

My 2¢ is that as long as Apple continues to tighten up Catalina and Big Surprise security, that there will be challenges for both Catalina and Big Sur users. After testing Catalina during the public beta, I decided it wasn’t for me and reverted to Mojave. I just have too many 32-bit apps. Sigh, it looks like an M1 Mac is not gonna be in my future.

I agree, after some incremental problems with Catalina and older apps myself. It will only get worse as they force you to go to newly accredited apps with less and less consideration for legacy. All they have to do is site Security flaws as their excuse now. So unless you are an Apple developer or closely follow what they are doing, you are libel to be behind the curve every time they change something.
Yrs, in many ways they are improving their platform, however, it does leave the smaller businesses scrambling to stay in the game. Too bad.It is unfortunately the way of Big Tech these days.