I am a fairly new user of MC18/MC19, and am finding MC19 much less reliable than MC18 (and therefore I use MC18 much more often). I used MC18 for about 2 months before installing MC19.0.32. I found MC18 and MC19.0.32 both reliable, but upon changing to newer versions starting with MC19.0.54 (no updates between), MC19 has be unreliable, with some updates running for a day or two before crashing, but others not going an hour. I currently have MC19.0.91 installed and it ran for about a day before crashing.
My computers is a modest Athlon duo processor, Dell 570 with 8MB RAM, and running 64-bit Win7. My DAC is an Audio-gd NFB-28, with VIA32 USB receiver capable of 32/384K, but not DSD. I have installed the Audio-gd drivers and am using VIA DirectKS [ASIO] as my Output Mode. I run MC18 using Kernal Streaming (ASIO not working with MC18). I have tried KS on MC19 and that did not change its behavior.
1) I find MC19 erroneously pauses ever so often. It sometimes seems like this is associated with system resource issues with other processes on my PC. I have many Chrome internet tabs open and a few Excel models open as well. Sometimes this seems to coincide with an Excel recalc, but this does not happen with all the time, but if it happens once, it seems to reoccur with subsequent recalcs. Note that this does NOT happen with MC18, and MC18 has a much bigger sample size of these conditions.
2) After MC19 has an erroneous pause, MC19 will often produce a background "tick" sound every several seconds.
3) Sometimes when I stop an album that is playing, MC19 will crash. I also have strange behavior with MC18, if I pause an album and then hit play, it starts playing in hyper speed. But MC18 does not have problems when stopping an album and then play.
4) MC19 sometimes (but not always) pauses play for a fraction of second when switch a pane view while playing an album. This was a bigger issue in earlier versions, but not MC19.0.32.
5) MC19 frequently pauses when playing a DSD file (converted to 176K or 88K PCM), but MC18 does NOT pause.
6) Both MC18 and MC19 have problems playing DSD converted to 352K PCM, it produces high frequency noise, with the music in the background. If I then stop the playing, the noise remains, but it takes changing the output setting and then replaying to stop the noise. There are no problems converting DSD to 176K or 88K PCM. My DAC supports 352K/32 and 376K/32.
7) Both MC18 and MC19 have identical problems playing native 352K PCM files as 6).
I have only fed my DAC 352K PCM or DSD files using MC, so I have NOT proven that problem does resides with MC.
