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ssl plays noise instead of a wavefile
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ssl plays noise instead of a wavefile

Product
Scratch Live
Version
-
Hardware
Ortofon | Serato S-120
Computer
-
OS
Platform
-
MartAttkinson 11:57 PM - 5 August, 2004
hi out there...

today i discovered a strange bug.
while playing for 5 hours it happened a few times that ssl didn´t load the wave (44.1khz 24 bit) correctly.
instead it loaded a random noise (not buzz or humm)... sounds like clipped white noise.
the noise shows up like a big blue line in track-overview and main waveform display.
reloading the track ends up with the same.
some songs later it loaded the track correctly (seemed to be no longer in cache) and rebuilt track-overview.

it seemed to happen only if i was streaming two waves from external harddisk (maxtor with firewire).

the laptop i used at this gig was an 2.6 ghz (celeron) with intel 82855pm chipset, running xp and ssl 1.1 latest build.

maybe it´s partly problem of the laptop (crappy machine). but shouldn´t show this effect in ssl.

did somebody already had the same problem?
this is the first time i discovered this. all other sessions has been fine.

is it possible to tell ssl to reload (and rebuilding track overview) avoiding the cache?

thanks,
mart
Serato
Josh 1:46 AM - 6 August, 2004
Mart are you able to reproduce this problem all the time? Was it only when streaming 2 files at once fromthe same drive?

Are you doing anything which might mess with the chipset timing like overclocking?

If you haven't already, make sure you have the latest versions of your BIOS and chipset driver.

You could consider converting the waves to 16bit if you don't need them in 24bit, but I'm not saying that's part of the problem... less disk access would be a better thing given your processor.

If you delete the file from your library and then re-import it you will re build the overview, but files aren't cached from play-to-play it is re-read in each time.
MartAttkinson 5:32 PM - 8 August, 2004
Hi Josh,

the problem occured sometimes, but was not reproducable.
Happend only in case of playing one song and loading the next one (both from the same external firewire-disk).
If I remember right, it was only when a song was never loaded before (preview was not build completely).

This was a three-day set (each between 6 and 9 hours playtime) and SSL including the laptop was given. As I already mentioned the laptop was crappy, but not misconfigured or overclocked.
The next day I installed new drivers for the chipset and did some tuning for xp in case of using it for audio-productions, before I started playing.

After this I had no more problems for the next two days of the gig. So, I think it was a problem with the out-dated drivers which have been preinstalled.
Sadly there was not much time for having a closer look where it came from... but I´m quite sure it was the chipset-driver which messed up the data in case of heavy load on firewire.

I mentioned caching above... I meant file-cache in windows.

Maybe it´s possible to give a feature (shortkey) in one of the next versions for reloading and rebuilding preview without getting it from windows file-cache. If I remember right there is a flag in filesystem calls to tell windows loading a file without using cache.
Ok, there is no need for this if everything is ok, but in my case it would have been nice. ;-)

Thanks for your fast response,
Mart

btw: even on the weak laptop there has been no crash for three days, that´s why I´ve choosen SSL :-)