Swapped mouse buttons appears to "confuse" Vinyl Studio

[Javic]

I've been having an ongoing problem with mouse use in VS that seems to be worse with the latest version (13.1.1). I'm using Windows 7, and I have my primary and secondary mouse buttons swapped via Control Panel (I use the mouse with my left hand).

Most of the time the mouse works fine, but even with earlier versions I found that after a bit of use (maybe an hour or so), mouse clicks and gestures would stop working. For example, right-click would not display a context menu where it should, or I couldn't "grab" things with the mouse for click-and-drag operations. What's worse, the mouse problems would persist even after exiting VS; I would need to reboot my machine to recover normal mouse button operations.

I still have those behaviors with the latest version, but also some that are even worse. In particular, in the Split Tracks tab, I clicked the button to play the first and last 5 secs. of each track. Suprisingly, the "Play" button did not change to "Stop". That is, the left-most button in the toolbar still displayed the right-pointing "Play" arrow. Pressing the button had no effect. Neither did pressing SPACE. In fact, I couldn't stop playback at all and had to listen to every single track before it stopped at the end. No mouse clicks anywhere had any effect during playback (but they did apparently queue up, and did some damage once they finally took effect after playback stopped).

Also in the Split Tracks tab, when I drag the start/end track indicators (red & green arrows+lines), the track indicators do not move as I drag. They appear at the new position only after "dropping" (i.e., releasing the mouse button). This issue makes it extremely difficult to precisely position track breaks. I didn't have this problem with previous versions.

I can't say for certain if any/all of these issues are related to my swapped mouse buttons, but I've run into issues like this from time to time with other software, so thought it might be worthwhile posting here to see if the button swap is indeed causing issues with VS.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

I just tried swapping the mouse buttons on my Windows 7 testing rig here and it all seems to work ok.  Also, from what you say, your problems probably run deeper than that.

I'd start by swapping the buttons back, just to see if it makes any difference.  My guess is it won't, in which case it can only be that there is something wrong with your Windows installation, although I've no idea what.  In particular, the code that drags markers around hasn't changed AFAIK, although, again as a test, we could revert you to V12.5.3 temporarily to see if it helps.

[Javic]

Well, I just fired up VS to try it with "regular" button bindings as you suggest, and now the controls in Split Tracks are working just fine with my swapped buttons. Maybe yesterday's weirdness was yet another symptom of the more general problem I described, that "after a while" the mouse buttons stop operating properly.

I agree that it does seem unlikely that VS is causing the issue, but my mouse button malfunction arises only after using this particular software, so something it's doing seems to trigger the problem. Do you have any idea what that might be? The behavior I observe is what I'd expect if some mouse events were being missed or mishandled. Is that possible? Do you have any other ideas for diagnosing the problem given that it never appears unless I run VS?

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

I have the vaguest of ideas, yes.  When dragging things, VinylStudio loops on a short interval timer (short enough to make dragging suitably responsive).

Not all programs do it this way.  It's a longshot, but maybe that's the difference.  But why it should be causing a problem I really don't know.  What graphics card do you have?  Maybe the issue is related to that (or the drivers that are used with that).

[Javic]

Re. dragging: Well that's something to look at. I'll pay particular attention to see if the mouse problems start after using a drag-and-drop feature.

Re. video card: I have an Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB. (I think it's the last series they made that has Win7 drivers.) The driver I'm using is recent but not the latest. (Latest driver doesn't work very well.)

[Javic]

Better late than never follow-up: I think the problems I was having might have been caused by a defective mouse. I started noticing other mouse-related problems (e.g., mouse would stop working for a second in games, and then start working again), so I replaced the mouse and haven't seen this issue since.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

OK, thanks for the follow-up.  Fingers crossed then 🤞