Screen Saver Aerial Freezing

[Chilltravelers]

I just installed Sonoma on my Mac Studio with a Studio display. I select the aerial screen saver, and it runs for a few minutes and freezes. I also have Sonoma on an iMac Pro, and it runs fine and never freezes. Any help as to a fix would be appreciated. Bob

 

[MacsBug]

Hi Bob,

Aerial just had an update to version 3.3.1. If you have an older version, this may fix your issues.

 

[TonyAguila]

I just installed Sonoma on my Mac Studio with a Studio display. I select the aerial screen saver, and it runs for a few minutes and freezes. I also have Sonoma on an iMac Pro, and it runs fine and never freezes. Any help as to a fix would be appreciated. Bob

I have the Studio, but not the Studio Display—I have dual 32" LG displays. Never had a problem with the screensavers, even in 14.1. Have you tried other animated screensavers? I must have tried a couple dozen and they all seem to work fine. But I’m no fan, so I just chose the default Sonoma and my desktop is a solid color. Know also that every time you pick one, it needs to be downloaded first. I’m trying to find where they are stored so I can delete them. But right now, I’m more focused on hunting bugs…

By the way, I read somewhere about a firmware update to the Studio Display. If you haven’t done so, this might be the solution.

 

[Chilltravelers]

Hi Tony, Thanks.

Yes, this is the embedded aerial, and they all stall at about the same time. The more traditional ani's do not stall or freeze. Seems like it is just the videos.

Both the mac and monitor are up-to-date.

I took a quick look to try and find the files with no luck. I found the screensaver folder in the system folder, but nothing looked like videos. Sorry that I cannot help with your delete quest.

Bob

 

[TonyAguila]

Hi Tony, Thanks.

Yes, this is the embedded aerial, and they all stall at about the same time. The more traditional ani's do not stall or freeze. Seems like it is just the videos.

Both the mac and monitor are up-to-date.

I took a quick look to try and find the files with no luck. I found the screensaver folder in the system folder, but nothing looked like videos. Sorry that I cannot help with your delete quest.

Bob

Bob, just learned that there’s no easy way to locate the downloaded aerials and that they will be automatically deleted when your storage gets near-full. Yikes! I get nervous once my free space goes below 50%. The lesson there is don’t go crazy trying all those screensavers. The, what I call, long-distance deletion of text seems to only happen on web pages. I haven’t seen anything similar in text apps or other programs like InDesign, Word, etc. But that’s not good either. It makes it that much harder to pin down the bug.

Now that you’re on Sonoma, I suggest acquiring a copy of the installer (Install macOS Sonoma.app) so that you can easily reinstall a fresh copy of the system when things are not working right. And having the installer will make it easy to create bootable installer drives (e.g. USB thumb drives, SD cards, external drives, etc.) The 4.0 installer is already available from the App Store, and other servers. Cheers!

Edit: I forgot to suggest that you boot in Safe Mode and test to see how the aerial screensavers work. And if you have a secondary user, admin or not, or you could create one, log into that user to check the same.

 

[Plushious]

I just installed Sonoma on my Mac Studio with a Studio display. I select the aerial screen saver, and it runs for a few minutes and freezes. I also have Sonoma on an iMac Pro, and it runs fine and never freezes. Any help as to a fix would be appreciated. Bob

I'm wondering if maybe the log-in condition, or more precisely the time before password request or display turn-off might have something to do with this behavior.

I, too have encountered the freeze, but only occasionally. I haven't tracked it, but it seems to happen after it's been going a good long while in my case, hours, which may be an important clue.

Conditions:
My system is always set to start the screensaver at either 3 or 5 minutes inactive.
Display to turn off when inactive for 3 hours.
Require password 1 hour after screensaver begins or display turned off.
Mac M1, OSX 14.1.2, external HDMI display

Problem:
I will come to my computer I was using some undetermined "long" time earlier. The display is still on (meaning it's been less than 3-hours according to my settings), but I have no movement from the Aerial screensaver. Tapping the trackpad brings the login screen, still no movement. I log in. Going to settings and selecting "preview" of the stalled screensaver, does not start it moving as it should. One must first change it, then change back to get it to work.

I haven't bothered yet to correlated my various display and login setting times with this freeze yet, but I suspect it may be important in zeroing in on this bug.

Since Aerial files are really large, and downloading them all takes over 50GB, Apple realized that's rather large for some of their smaller SSD customers. They designed the screensaver running Aerial to only keep a limited set of those files onboard your computer at any one time, and you can't change that behavior. It self-deletes files that haven't been used or selected for an unknown pre-determined-by-algorithm length of time vs. space used. Even if you download all of them in one session, if you go back and try the first one you dowloaded, it's provably gone already.

What that means is only a fraction of the available Aerial screensavers are ever loaded onto your computer at any one time, even when you select to use "all" of them in rotation. The constant re-uploading of the same file over-and-over again the same day is normal behavior if you're running "all" of them - all the time.

Like I said, I know of no way to change or turn that behavior off, but it's confirmed screensaver behavior as I picked up on other support boards.

Solution?
I will hazard a guess that maybe one of my display-off, password, or login duration states may conflict with the screensaver's attempt to re-load the image that stalled. Maybe the stall occurs because the file is incompletely restored or activated before one of those state changes

 

[Plushious]

Well... I have just found out that screensavers do not animate when you are logged out. That, perhaps, answers that in my case, since I have my computer set to require a password one hour after starting screensavers.