Linux Regular Spotify Crash

[Winskitech711]

Running Elementary OS 0.3, I regularly (every 2-3 days) get a "spotify crashed with SIGABRT in pa_stream_get_timing_info()" message.

Package is spotify-client 1:0.9.17.1

I found 3 threads in the forums about previous versions with similar error messages. Has anyone found a solution to this?

Any help is appreciated.

[Erkan_Yılmaz]

Sounds weird, but any guess what could cause it:

I mean, does it happen after a certain action, or after running for so long (2-3 days),... ?

I guess for better analysis devs would need a crash dump (plus running threads dump and so on)

[Winskitech711]

What's the easiest way to get those files? (I'm fairly new to Linux)

[Winskitech711]

This is what I caught in syslog:

Jul  7 17:06:21 XXXElemOS whoopsie[1216]: online
Jul  8 14:18:58 AdamElemOS whoopsie[1216]: Parsing /var/crash/_opt_spotify_spotify-client_spotify.1000.crash.
Jul  8 14:18:58 XXXXElemOS whoopsie[1216]: Uploading /var/crash/_opt_spotify_spotify-client_spotify.1000.crash.
Jul  8 14:19:00 XXXXElemOS whoopsie[1216]: Sent; server replied with: No error
Jul  8 14:19:00 XXXXElemOS whoopsie[1216]: Response code: 200
Jul  8 14:19:00 XXXXElemOS whoopsie[1216]: Got command: OOPSID

 I hope that helps.

[Winskitech711]

If anyone could let me know how to obtain a crash dump and running thread dump for Spotify, I would appreciate it.

Thanks

[Erkan_Yılmaz]

Your post above shows already something interesting:

/var/crash/_opt_spotify_spotify-client_spotify.1000.crash

could be a dump

but: to be sure do this:

1. start spotify from terminal, then you see log messages

2. then you will see at begin something like:

04:42:30.540 I [breakpad.cpp:261 ] Searching for crashdumps: /home/YOUR_USER_HERE/.cache/spotify/*.dmp

this is also a dump

More about creating yourself dumps, if you don't find anything in the log messages

[Winskitech711]

It finally crashed for me again!

Here's what I got from the terminal right before the crash:

Assertion 's' failed at pulse/stream.c:2525, function pa_stream_get_timing_info(). Aborting.
Aborted (core dumped)

Here's what I'm confused about, what file did the core dump to? There's no new .crash file (not to say the old crash wasn't caused by the same thing). And there's no *.dmp file I can find on my system.

Any help, specifically about where spotify is dumping this information to, is appreciated.

[Winskitech711]

If it helps, this is what I get when I restart the program from the command line:

13:16:53.668 I [breakpad.cpp:269                ] Searching for crashdumps: /home/XXXX/.cache/spotify/*.dmp

13:16:53.911 E [offline_key_store.cpp:77        ] Offline: failed to load key stores, error 7007, path /home/XXXX/.cache/spotify/Users/121472519-user/offline2

[Winskitech711]

It happened again, here's a little bit more of what was running in the terminal, I'll post it below. Even after searching around in the forum here I was unable to decipher where this "core dump" file is at. In another post someone mentioned a stack trace but I'm not sure that's relevant to this issue.

12:55:34.436 I [audio_driver_linux.cpp:19       ] Using PulseAudio
12:56:03.633 I [ad_chooser.cpp:1251             ] Found ad (time = 318, adclass = '', time left = 45, length = 30)
12:56:03.637 I [ap_chunk_downloader.cpp:75      ] Requesting data (0 -> 524288) from AP for file 8b8bd2fc53efaaf68c59805736ab10c9a6c75f2f
12:56:03.637 D [spirc_manager.cpp:710           ] GAIA: SpircManager::stpLoad, track=spotify:ad:12345678901234567890123456789012, index=0, position=0, paused=0
12:56:03.637 D [spirc_manager.cpp:1883          ] GAIA: SpircManager::becomeActiveDevice
Assertion 's' failed at pulse/stream.c:2525, function pa_stream_get_timing_info(). Aborting.
Aborted (core dumped)

[Erkan_Yılmaz]

Did you check yet, if this is a dump file:

> /var/crash/_opt_spotify_spotify-client_spotify.1000.crash
> could be a dump

If it's not, I have no clue why your system does not create the dumps, perhaps this (1) may help you.

So, to get a "manual dump", do this:

1. run spotify via gdb
-> about core/to get the dump, see section "Crashes and Core Dumps" at (2)

2. when spotify crashed inside gdb, type in gdb:

backtrace
thread apply all bt

(1) http://www.itsprite.com/how-to-enablegeneratedebug-core-dump-in-linux/
(2) http://betterexplained.com/articles/debugging-with-gdb/

[Winskitech711]

I just checked the details on that .crash file, it does appear to have updated according to my latest crash. What do I do with that file? Do I send that to someone at spotify? Do I need to open it up and look for a specific section?

[Rorey]

Hey there @Winskitech711. Welcome to the community. 

Pinging @nikreiman who might be able to take a look 🙂 

[nikreiman]

Generally speaking, we don't want users to send crash dumps to us. We actually collect crash dumps on our servers in a manner similar to Google Chrome and other products. So odds are, we know about the crashes already. 🙂

In this particular case, there's a few things to note. First, the 0.9.17 client is the end of the line for the 0.9.x clients on Linux. Yes, it is the current stable version for that platform, but we're concentrating all of our efforts on the 1.x clients which are currently in beta. Barring crititcal security or authentication-related fixes, we will probably not make any additional releases for the 0.9.x clients on any platform. For more information about the 1.x beta (including installation instructions), see this thread: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Announcements/Spotify-Client-1-x-beta-for-Linux-has-been-re...

That said, there have been some PulseAudio related crashes reported in Linux already. We're not able to reproduce them internally and hence have been unable to solve them so far. So if you continue to have PA-related crashes with the 1.x client, a good workaround would be to use an alternate audio driver under Linux.

Hope this helps!

[Winskitech711]

I tried the 1.0 beta but no media key support and the inability to delete out local files (I get a lot of duplicates when adding in my own local files) means I'm back on the 0.9 version.

I took @nikreiman 's other suggestion and removed pulse audio...I think. I can't find an easy way for me to tell if I've scraped all of pulse audio out of my system.

[Winskitech711]

I've been running a week now on the 0.9 version with Pulse Audio removed and I haven't crashed once. This is a great hold over until the 1.x betas support media keys again.