Second kdenlive application in macos dock?

Help
1

Hi, all,

I’m pretty new to kdenlive, using version 23.08.2. I’m on a Mac running 14.1.

Whenever I launch kdenlive by clicking on it in the dock, a second kdenlive application opens with a different logo – the audio bars on the left hand side have more lines and the whole thing is less blurry. It bounces for a very long time while the “real” kdenlive application is running. Eventually it stops bouncing but doesn’t have a little “running” light underneath it. Right-clicking on it shows me “Application Not Responding” and picking “Show in Finder” brings me to the kdenlive application bundle in the Applications folder with the smaller icon. After a long while, it spontaneously closes.

Any idea what’s going on?

Thanks!

Becca

2

There are two things (one easy , one more complex) you could try (I don’t have Kdenlive on my old MacBook Pro, but the principle is the same as for other programs):

  1. Quit Kdenlive.
    Remove the Kdenlive icon from the dock, in Finder go to the Applications folder and re-add the Kdenlive icon to the dock.
    Try if this helped.

  2. Quit Kdenlive.
    Open Terminal from Utilities and enter
    cd .config
    ls -l
    See if there is a Kdenlive folder listed (you can identify that something is a folder by the “d” at the beginning of the line).
    Enter
    mv put_the_exact_name_of_the_kdenlive_folder_here old-kdenlive
    and write down the exact name of the original Kdenlive folder before.
    (This will rename the Kdenlive settings folder for your user account and Kdenlive will create a new one at its next start.
    If you do have very important settings or if this did not help, you could always get your old Kdenlive setting folder back by opening Terminal again and entering
    cd .config
    mv old-kdenlive put_the_name_of_the_original_kdenlive_folder_here ).
    Close Terminal and try if this helped. If it did just forget about the old folder. :wink:

If nothing of the above helped, you could try another - even more complex - thing…

3

Option 1 actions and results:

  • I right-clicked on the the “low-quality” icon in the dock and removed it successfully. If this failed, I’d probably have bigger problems!
  • I opened the Applications folder pop-out thingamjig from the dock and dragged the Kdenlive to the dock. The “high-quality” icon successfully appeared in the dock. A failure here would have also been very weird!
  • I clicked on the Kdenlive icon in the dock. The “high quality” icon was replaced with the “low quality” icon and back to the original issue.
  • When I right-clicked the Kdenlive active “low-quality” Kdenlive icon and quit the application, the new “high quality” icon disappeared from the dock and the low-quality icon was replaced with the high-quality one. Weird?

Option 2 actions and results:

I did a cd .config and then an ls -Al. There was not a kdenlive directory! Really! (I should have specified I’m technically savvy, though I do appreciate your explanations as to what the commands do! Please do keep explaining though as the macos command line is not my area of expertise!)

becca@NX-76884 ~/.config % ls -Al
total 16
-rw-r--r--@  1 becca  staff  6148 Nov  2 16:35 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x   3 becca  staff    96 Oct 23 21:23 NuGet
drwx------  10 becca  staff   320 Nov  2 13:06 darktable
drwx------   3 becca  staff    96 Nov 25 16:44 gtk-2.0

So just to see what happened, I tried lsof | grep enlive | grep /becca | grep REG. I know that’s not guaranteed to find the directory if Kdenlive closes the files it opens, but it’s worth a try. It’s got regular files open in the following directories:

  • ~/Library/Saved Application State/
  • ~/Library/Caches/
  • ~/Library/Caches/kdenlive/

Okay! Let’s go for the more complex thing! Thank you so much for your help :woman_technologist:

4

Also, just to clarify about my installation, this is a brand new Mac that I received with macos 13 (I can never remember all the names) installed. I migrated my user using the macos migration tool, then updated macos to 14 Sonoma, then installed a fresh copy of Kdenlive.

Also also, this doesn’t seem to be affecting the functionality of Kdenlive. It’s just a little wierd. And I know some ports to macOS do un-Mac-like things with child processes and the like.

5

Sorry, I have been really busy…

OK - the next things you could try are:

  • removing the contents of a Kdenlive folder in /Library/ Application\ Support/
  • removing Kdenlive’s settings file(s) in /Library/Preferences/
  • removing cache files could also be worth a try

All of the above when Kdenlive is not running.
Start Kdenlive after each of the things and see if it has changed anything - otherwise you will probably have to write a bug report or contact the Kdenlive team…