PDF export weird error message

[Reinhold H.]

David,

Thanks for the report. The reason is "memory" or more accurately "address space". The available address space is not given by the memory of the PC but by the address space of the software. Composer is a Win32 application for very good reasons where the maximum addressing space is 4GByte. Windows requires 2GB and leaves 2GB for the application. These 2GB are the maximum address space available for Composer. In fact 2GB is a lot for one single application.

However, when using large or very large soundfont these 2GB address space may not be enough in certain situation like a PDF export when this is big, too. Therefore we have implemented in the software that before the PDF export starts the Notation Software Synth is terminated and the soundfont are unloaded which frees up memory for the PDF export. After the PDF export is finished, the Notation Software Synth is started again with loading the actual used soundfont into the memory. That all happens in the background and is part of the PDF export activity.

The situation which you see here is that the Timbres of Heaven soundfonts cannot be re-loaded again. In fact Timbres of Heaven are also huge and require next to 400MB. Windows may have not completely freed up the address space used by the PDF export while Composer already tries to load the soundfont. This message appears when Composer gracefully handles a temporary shortage of address space when loading soundfonts. I thought such a situation will never happen but here we go. I am glad to have this graceful reaction implemented.

In the beta there is no difference compared to Composer 3.0.6. I will investigate again the address limits to fully understand the situation and in particular that there is nothing broken in the beta.

Again thanks for the notification.

Reinhold