"Built-In" Quartz Composer patches won't show up in the library but appear in compositions

Sorry, forgot to attach the screenshot in my post. Here it is.

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Have you also deleted the QC cache files?

No, I don't think I have. How do I do that?

Go to

~/Library/Caches - BTW ~ stands for your Home Directory.

That's the one with your user name in the Finder SideBar.

Then find QCCompositionRepository-com.apple.QuartzComposer.editor.cache & delete - job done.

Okay, the "interpolation" patch is back but Math, Smooth, Audio Input, etc. are still gone. I'll try rebooting and see if that works. Also, thanks :-)

EDIT: No, it didn't work. :-(

Did you ever find a solution? The same thing happened to me when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I also tried reinstalling the developer tools, which did not do anything.

Have you tried removing all 3rd party patches and plugins?

I tried this, did a restart, same problem. I had also tried deleting the cache files.

Any more ideas?

Thanks

If you have multiple partitions installed, are you sure that you're opening the correct version of quartz composer?

Have you done a "get info" on the app icon of QC in the Developer folder to see if changing 32bit/64bit mode makes a difference?

Are you opening up a particular qtz every time? Try a different one.

On the patch library, do you see the "patch library" icon, and the word Library next to it, or something different?

No change 64/32 bit. Same error comes up when opening other compositions. I am viewing the library of the patches as you can see.

Thanks again for the help though!

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I sometimes find that this sort of result can be obtained when opening up older .qtz files and also files from 3rd parties, especially with their own custom patches and / or virtual macros required. I'm specifically not speaking of virtual macros themselves. I always find that closing the application and re-opening the file in a freshly booted QC session works for me, but by the sounds of it, that probably won't help you out.

You will benefit from first ensuring that your default installation of QC works AOK. Does it open all the Develop examples AOK? It should. Then try adding in the 3rd party plugs and patches.

Clearing the cache is one measure that usually clears up the blank comps issue and also OpenCL / GLSL kludge.

Could also be to do with wrong framework version of QC. I wonder if something didn't get written right when you upgraded to SL?

FWIW, I did a fresh install after doing the upgrade install path and found that it gave me greater stability.

Ok, I uninstalled developer tools, and currently doing a fresh install. Hopefully this will fix the problem. I will report back soon!

I had this exact thing happen to me exactly once, and ended up either logging out, or restarting to get it going - though you ended up doing that and it still didn't work. I may have ended up doing a "hard boot" and not doing the "auto restart", not sure. It sucks, because I did a flurry of things all in one swoop, it worked, and I didn't take much care to note what I did.

I would be curious if you have read/write permissions to all of the necessary folders, and if your permissions have gotten hosed up somehow. Do you have read/write permission on your Developer folder (use Get Info)?

I would tend to follow the suggestion that if these lines of thought aren't helping, to try opening up QC from another User profile.

If none of that works, then maybe a fresh Xcode install might solve the problem, but you really shouldn't need that... weird.

fyi

As I said before, I uninstalled developer tools, reinstall, restart, test, no.

get info on developer folder, read and write for the user (which was already there) and applied to all subfolders, test, no.

Repaired permissions in disk utility, test, no.

Logged in as a different user, test, no.

Should I reinstall SL?

I asked about it at the Apple Genius Bar, unfortunately the guy I asked didn't know much about the developer tools. It doesn't seem like that's their "realm" of expertise, I mean if it was they'd probably be writing software instead of working at the Genius Bar… I wonder who else it would be possible to contact about this issue?

Well, given that the type problem you've described has been previously apprehended and has proven rectifiable by applying the kind of measures suggested I can honestly say that posting a question about this to the Developer's list might be a good idea.

The "Genius" bar is pretty much for OS X Desktop & iWork & iLife product users. It's actually high quality customer service - a real personal touch to facilitating the 'everyday' use of the Macintosh OS & Apple's products that run their version of that OS. It's not intended to provide support for Developers at all so far as I'm aware.

The Developer forums for XCode & Quartz Composer might be a better place to look.

In the meantime, I would, if persistently presented with such a problem, begin to look into the GF Log when QC is running [needs to be enabled in the extra Preferences section for QC - press Alt/Option whilst selecting Preferences from the QC File menu] & also the Console for any odd QC related reports.

BTW, are you running this QC installation from your Startup Disk, or is it installed upon a separate HDD volume ? I couldn't help but notice that this had been asked , but didn't seem to have been answered.

If it isn't installed upon the main HDD, that can cause all sorts of problems as the file paths aren't magically relative, they are, effectively, 'hard-wired' file paths.

sometimes when i open qc, my patch library is completely empty and void of all patches even if i can see the ones in the given composition in the editor. the problem is always fixed for me on a re-launch. things are bit weird from time to me like qc will open 4 copies of a patch i never saved and still prompts me to choose a template even if i have qc set to do nothing on application launch.

honestly it bugs sometimes as qc will hang at launch then open 4 copies of patches i never saved and what ever else was the last composition i was working on and prompts me to choose a template when i ask it do nothing on launch. then sometimes it does nothing like it is supposed to.

my only work around without nuking everything is to open a recent app before qc has the chance to bug out or go new blank composition in which case it will create a new blank comp but then a few seconds later i will get the choose a template screen that i have to cancel out of it. after all that the library sometimes is empty and i have to re-launch and do it all over again. i mean its a minor issue to me as a fresh reinstall is a bigger pain.

i just assume it all has something to do with various qc hacks i use which far out weigh me having to choose template as per the hacks usefulness to my workflow.

normally on a clean xcode install the cache prevents any of my preference settings from becoming active for what seems likes hours or days, kind of seems arbitrary as to when qc wants to update its preferences, or when the cache wants to purge itself and honor said preferences.

i know that sounds weird as i highly doubt apple has set any cache purging frequencies to random but thats what it seems like. maybe it just has something to do with enabling private prefs or how often i use qc during my day etc...

sorry i can't offer any help as normally a restart clears my empty patch creator library problem. i know my computer was having issues with 10.6.2. i think providing what system your using what version of qc, what graphics card your using etc.. can all help this problem as it seems your not the only one to experience this.

Do you still have your computer set so that you're forcing it to boot in 64bit kernel mode? I was thinking about that the other day (not your setup, just in general), and I don't know if that's a good idea.

Well, I don't actually know if it's such a bad idea to run a 64 bit kernel either.

My installation[s] of 10.6.4 and of 10.6.3 have all been running with Secure Virtual Memory and 64 bit kernel enabled.

I've had crashes, but they do not seem at all related to the kernel being in 64 bit mode. I have not had a single kernel panic. Oops, a slight word of a lie, upon a re-examination of records at hand, but only one & it was forced.

They've almost all been created by either Safari & Flash, iTunes and b-a-a-d OpenCL [of mine], or my asking QC to pipeline everything like a squishy octopus when what QC is dealing with won't "squish up" at all :-) [Like badly coded experimental OpenCL, over loaded Iterations, whatever].

I do like the comment on one of the pertinent Tech Notes : -

"Note: A 64-bit kernel is not the same thing as a 64-bit processor."

To which one might add that switching kernels is not the same as switching an application's bit mode.

Has it been your experience to date that running 10.6.x is more stable in a 32 bit kernel, GT ?

I don't think the kernel itself benefits much from running in 64 bit mode, and 32 bit kernel extensions/drivers aren't going to work. I also think that since the seeds are always set to boot into 32bit kernel, that this is the mode that is scrutinized the most. There more likeliness of the non-standard setup causing unforeseen problems than it being of benefit.

I don't find QC to be wildly unstable in any scenario... I know a few things that can crash it in SL in various modes, but none of them are dealbreakers, really. I wish that it was threaded so that what's going on in the Editor could still work even if the Viewer portion gets hosed.

Two more things to try:

1) nuke your QC plists (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.QuartzComposer.editor.plist

2) create a new dummy user account, log in, and see if QC works as expected. If so, something with your user account is wrong, otherwise something with your system is wrong.

cybero wrote:
Has it been your experience to date that running 10.6.x is more stable in a 32 bit kernel, GT ?

[I'm not GT ;)]

My experience has been that 64bit kernels cause all kinds of unusual/uncommon issues, simply because it's an uncommon path (which means less testing, which means more bugs). I've seen systems that will boot 64bit kernels, but not have drivers for all their hardware (so certain pieces of functionality don't work, like the GPU -- software rendering for everything, how's that for a speed boost!? [yes, there was a shipping configuration like this :)] ).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Unless you've literally got more than 16GB of ram, there's no point in you running a 64bit kernel. period. Honestly, what do you intend to gain? your cache is cooler (because pointers are twice as large, so half as many fit in cache, leading to more evictions/RAM transactions), you have more registers that are also larger (for all that intensive SSE code ... that takes place in kernel mode, like ... uh.. I'm sure it's used somewhere!), and you get to benefit from code that's less tested. Sign me up! :) (and this is coming from a guy who works where those kernels are made, and keeps his work machines pretty close to the latest beta builds possible as a matter of course).

Instead of discussing stability, I'm interested to hear about a real-world improvement offered by running K64. Hand-waving need not apply, show me the numbers.

(don't take this as a "the kernel will never be mainstream 64bit!" statement or anything, because I'm sure it will be someday, and when that happens it will be a common path, and much testing will happen, but until then I really can't think of a reason to opt-in unless you've got an Xserve farm or something.)

It's on my startup disk, yeah. Quartz Composer had been working perfectly for a long time and then all of a sudden it started getting all screwy. I've asked several times on the developer forums, to no avail.

Is the machine still under warranty? Have you carried out the AHT? [Apple Hardware Test]. Begins to sound like a bench job to me. Commiseration's.

Yousee if you've actually done a clean install that should clear out all gnarlies and you'll be starting afresh, but if memory serves correct, you've already done that. As a result, I'd have thought something screwy elsewhere. Of course if its only QC ? Well, that'd be a different matter. What does the Console say?

So, after days of trouble i fixed nearly the same problem as discribed. My QC Version 4.0 (103.1) on SL 10.6.6 was terrible slow in case of loading the library.

I tried nearly everything as here discribed, like delete the cache files, reinstall plugins, delete the preferences, restarts and a complete clean new installation of xcode/developer tools, but nothing helps really.

After that i thought that there must be some other relevant files @work. I looked around and find two .plist files called: DTAssetLibraryAssetDates.plist and DTAssetLibraryGroups.plist in the "User/Library/Application Support/Quartz Composer/" folder.

A look in the file DTAssetLibraryGroups.plist with Proberty List Editor showed me the problem. 3920 items, nearly all of them are just blank "New Group" folders...

Here my solution that worked fine for me:

1. saved the 2 .plist files on the desk (just for backup reasons)

- DTAssetLibraryAssetDates.plist - DTAssetLibraryGroups.plist)

1. deleted the 2 .plist files in the folder: "User/Library/Application Support/Quartz Composer/"

2. turned off my MB Pro

3. restarted with deleting the PRAM by holding down +alt+p+r (I don't really know if the PRAM need to be deleted)

My Comment is just a respond of a solution that works fine for me. Quartz Composer runs fine and fast since i mad this. Maybe it helps some people with nearly same problems.

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This last post has made me find something interesting. 6 years later, I am in OS 10.12.3, Quartz Version 4.6.2.

When searching for that plists, I did not find the one of groups, but of dates. In the dates, I have a lot with year 1 - I wonder if that could be related with something like Y2K.

For me, this has no effect in my normal use. Maybe unrelated: there is one patch with problems, but its date here seems normal. Marked in the screenshot is one which appears in library (I actually don't have problems with that, for luck) and in most compositions, but every now and then an older compositions says it does not find it - but next time it appears I will apply the recommendations of post in this discussion, guess that will solve it.

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