A minor help request, towards debugging Musescore

[bunsen_h]

There's a bug in Musescore's web interface that I'm seeing quite consistently, which their developers seem not to be able to reproduce. I have several scores on their server which are quite short but which feature many repeats, resulting in a fairly long play duration. That duration is shown at the top left of the score, as displayed in a web browser, and should be 3:19:48.  But every browser I've tried, with a variety of setup options, on two machines at home and on one at my library, shows it as 27:19:48 -- that is, an extra day tacked on.  The pieces are monotonous, but not that monotonous..!

If you wouldn't mind, would you please take a look at: https://musescore.com/user/28554317/scores/9087566, and let me know what duration you see just above the upper left corner of the score?  (At the library, I had to expand the page to "full screen" mode with a button at the top left in order to see the duration display.  I don't know why that was different from my machines at home; it may be a matter of screen resolution.)  It might also be useful to me to know what operating system and browser you used.

Thanks!

Comments

[melita66]

Windows 11,
Chrome Version 108.0.5359.125 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Microsoft Edge Version 108.0.1462.76 (Official build) (64-bit)

both showed 27:19:48

Could you be crossing midnight? Possibly not your local midnight but utc or something else.

[bunsen_h]

I don't think that's it. I see the same thing regardless of time of day, from late morning in Ottawa (when I become functional) to an hour or so after midnight local time.

But I'm reminded of a bug I had to try to sort out nearly 30 years ago when I was the so-called "Manager of Scientific Support" for a software company. A few of our customers reported that a few of the commands in our scripting language weren't working. Eventually, one of them stumbled over part of the cause: the problem depended on the Windows language setting. Set to North American English, and most other languages, everything was fine. Set to some other languages, those commands didn't work. *Somehow,* a bog-standard library string comparison function -- comparing a string from a script to strings from a list of known commands -- was failing. (C's strcmp(), as best I can recall.) The bug popped up regardless of whether the script commands were being read from a plain-text file or being sent via the Windows API from, say, Excel or Visual Basic. We never did figure out why​; we didn't have the expertise or resources. All that we could do was to tell our customers how to work around the problem: change their language setting.

[bunsen_h]

The bug is affected by the OS time zone. If I set my machine's time zone to, say, Buenos Aires (UTC-03:00), the duration is displayed correctly. If I set it to Atlantic time (UTC-04:00), the duration is off by 24 hours. And if I change to Newfoundland time (UTC-03:30), the display is very​ messed up -- at the beginning of the piece, the displayed time is ".5:30:00 / .5:49:48". I haven't tested rigorously, but broadly speaking, time zones east of UTC-03:00 give correct displays, while zones west of UTC-04:00 show the bug.

I'm guessing that the problem involves the duration of the piece relative to one's time zone offset from UTC. A piece that's 1:00:00 in duration displays correctly in UTC-01:00, but shows as 25:00:00 in UTC-02:00.

[melita66]

Thanks for letting me know! That must have been crappy to test.

[bunsen_h]

It wasn't particularly difficult, just a bit tedious. I got to wondering if time zone might be the reason that different people were seeing or not seeing the problem, consistently, even if they were using more or less the same browsers and OSes. The behaviour seemed oddly similar to that of that 30-year-old bug.

It's nice to know that after all of the dysfunction I've been experiencing over the last few years, I still have some instinctive knack for tracking bugs by "feel".

I'm a bit annoyed that when I sent a message with this new information to Musescore, directly following up on my previous discussion after only a couple of days, I got a canned "please read the manual, or look for help in our forums" reply.