Crash recovery

LTCast is built to get back on its feet quickly, and to keep what you have built. This page explains what happens if the program's window dies in the middle of a session, and where your work can be recovered from.

If the window crashes

If the part of LTCast that draws the window and plays the audio stops unexpectedly, LTCast reloads it by itself about a second later. This happens up to three times in a session. Playback and the outputs stop at the moment of the crash — the audio and the timecode outputs are driven from that window — so press Play again once it is back.

After such a restart your setlist, cues and settings are still there, but the song that was loaded is not loaded again automatically. LTCast shows "LTCast recovered from a crash. The song was not reloaded automatically — click it in the setlist to load it." This is deliberate: very often what crashes the window is decoding one particular file, and loading it again would crash it again. You load the song yourself, knowing why it is not already there. If the window crashes more than three times, LTCast stops restarting it and asks you to restart the application by hand.

A normal launch

When you start LTCast normally it remembers your session: the setlist and your settings come back, and the song that was active when you last closed the app is loaded, ready to play.

Getting an unsaved show back

• Closing with unsaved changes. If you close the window with unsaved changes — or with a show that has songs in it but has never been saved — LTCast asks Save, Don't Save or Cancel (for a show that has never been saved, Save opens the Save As box). The same question appears before anything else replaces the open show: File → Open, Open Recent, import, Ctrl+O, double-clicking a .ltcast file, or choosing a saved show. When you go ahead, LTCast also takes an automatic version snapshot called Before opening a show of the show you are leaving (see Version snapshots and merging).
• Auto-save. A show that has a file and unsaved changes is saved to that file by itself every 5 minutes (you see an Auto-saved message).
• Automatic backups. While a show is open, LTCast saves a snapshot every few minutes (5 by default) and once more when you quit, to Documents/LTCast/Backups/<show name>/. A show that has never been saved is backed up too, once it has at least one song, into a folder called Unsaved show. To go back to one, use File → Open and pick the file with the date and time you want. See Auto-save & backups and Settings → System.
• Even so, save a new show once as soon as you start it: a backup is a safety net, not a saved show.

Crash reports

The installed app sends an anonymous crash report so the problem can be fixed — the crash, the LTCast version and the operating system, never your show. You can turn it off in Settings → System → Diagnostics (it takes effect after a restart).