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Author Topic: Various freezes playing music  (Read 2778 times)

clear and blue

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Various freezes playing music
« on: April 17, 2010, 03:26:18 pm »

Hi,

Before I delve into what has been troubling me, I would like to say that I have been very impressed with MC15. The improvement in sound quality (compared to WMP12) using WASAPI and source bit depth/sample rate has been so great that I recently ripped 150GB of flac from cds as I could'nt hear a difference between my computer and my cd player. Well done on that front! I love the library and the program in general is very easy to use yet powerful too.

What has been really galling though is the lack of stability. I hope this is something that is easily resolved as I am on the 30 day trial and would love to be able to buy the full license with confidence at the end of the trial period.

Here is a list of some of the problems I have been having:
  • I used to get crashes when I hit the stop button until I disabled "fade out on stop"
  • It often takes a couple of minutes to start playing a track and sometimes this can cause MC15 to crash
  • If my computer has gone to sleep, MC will crash when it wakes up
  • Sometimes MC crashes when it gets to the end of an album
  • Sometimes MC crashes when I close it
  • This may be WASAPI related but I find that sometimes if I try to watch a Youtube video or something after closing MC15, I can't get any sound and video stops after 1 second. Seeking to another point can get another 1 second of footage.

By crash I mean MC15 stops responding. If I try to open it again it gives me a message saying it can't open because it thinks a session is still open or in use by another user (only 1 user account on this computer). If I open task manager at this point I can see an application, service and process with the Media Center name and none of them will shut down when asked to. The only way to solve this is to restart the computer.

I am using a fairly new computer (intel Q4400, 4GB ram) running Windows 7 (64 bit) and use a Line 6 studio UX1 via USB as my DAC. I have tried both ASIO and WASAPI and it seems to be the same for both - Bit Perfect music playback is a big factor for me.

Does any of this sound familiar? I could not turn anything up in searches but hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction.

Cheers


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JimH

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Re: Various freezes playing music
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2010, 04:23:50 pm »

See this thread:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=57131.msg387816#msg387816

There is a link to an article on USB DAC settings near the bottom of the thread.

Try another device to test.
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clear and blue

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Re: Various freezes playing music
« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2010, 05:22:33 pm »

Thank you for your reply Jim,

Aside from the onboard soundcard, I don't have another USB device. I will check it with the onboard soundcard to see if the Line 6 preamp is the problem.

Could this explain the other problems though? For instance, MC has just right now finished playing an album and although it is only minimised to the taskbar I have no way of opening it up again. Having just managed to close it from the Task Manager, there is still a process called "Media Center 15.exe *32" that is holding on to 15,800k RAM. The amount of RAM it traps when crashed seems to vary depending on what it was playing at the time of freeze.

I will restart now and try the USB DAC settings recommendations of 24 bit output where before I have been using source bit depth.

Cheers
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clear and blue

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Re: Various freezes playing music
« Reply #3 on: April 27, 2010, 08:32:35 am »

After trying MC15, MC14 and now Jukebox, I gave ASIO4ALL a try. Well everything seems to be working fine now! Still using Jukebox for now but once I get my confidence back (have a few days of hassle free music) I may give MC15 another look. Fingers crossed!

Before using ASIO4ALL, was I using some kind of ASIO driver inside of Media Center (does it exist)? When selecting an output mode it now says Asio4All v.2 instead of ASIO UX1 (which is still selectable but is the output I had problems with)

If MC15/14/JB have their own ASIO drivers there may be an issue there to be flagged up. If by using "ASIO UX1" I was using the device's native drivers and not something from MC15 then I can't think what the issue would be. .
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JimH

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Re: Various freezes playing music
« Reply #4 on: April 27, 2010, 09:17:48 am »

The bad ASIO probably was your sound device driver.
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clear and blue

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Re: Various freezes playing music
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2010, 12:39:43 pm »

Ok, I have been using Media Center 15 for a good while now using ASIO4ALL without a single hitch. I have since purchased the software (from free trail) and I have been enjoying all the good features and sound quality without having another feeling of dread that my computer is about to crash.

To anyone who has similar problems using a recording based sound card, I'd suggest giving ASIO4ALL a go.

Thanks Jim, you can put this thread as solved if you like.
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