That's going to be the USB. Running a HD over USB 1.1 isn't really a good idea. You will want to make sure the auto-fill preview is disabled in the setup screen, that might help a bit.

Running an external USB device on USB 1.1 worked fine with FS, dont know why it shouldnot work with SSL, but I experience the same problems as Otter. Try a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card maybe...

Were you using exactly the same computer, and the same USB hard drive?
Are you saying that loading a track causes a TEN second audio pause?
I know Sam has tested a USB drive, and I think he would ahve said something to me if it caused a ten second pause in the audio. Sam - what were your results?

AJ, exactly the same computer and the same USB harddrive. But yes, USB 1.1 not USB 2.0

Is autofill on? I had similar problems playing tunes over a slow network connection when autofill was on - audio dropped out for several seconds. Switching off autofill (or just making sure the previews were built in advance) solved in in that case. But even a slow network is faster than USB 1 :)

I had this same issue with usb 1.1.... I believe I posted it a while back..... I couldnt even browse through songs.... it would take several seconds (5-10) to scroll to the next song if Id hit the down key..... loading songs would drop out for extended time (10 seconds or more).... I upgraded my laptop to usb 2.0 and it seems to be working fine.....

Nik and Petey, please tell me the brand of the laptop on which you experience this problem. To me it sounds way too extreme, and I am surprised. Even if you are using USB to browse files, it should be the file access that is slowed down.

So to be clear are you saying that if you load a track on the left while the right is playing, the right will fall silent for ten seconds? Or are you just saying that it would take ten seconds to start playing the new song.

Disk access should not be able to interrupt audio, because the audio bandwidth on the USB has been allocated ahead of time.

why is it nobody is using firewire?

Ermm...because a PC laptop which isn't new enough to have USB2 certainly isn't going to have firewire. My laptop has both, but I don't use any external drives.

People *are* using firewire, but because it works so well, they are not complaining about it. Hence the lack of discussion about firewire drives. I've been playing tunes directly off an iPod, and it works great.

im using an older hp laptop for ssl in the studio.... this was the laptop having those problems..... as soon as I discovered the issue, I upgraded the laptop to usb 2.0 and they went away..... but to answer your question, loading a song on deck b would cause a 10 second or more audio dropout on deck a.... and to make matters worse, scrolling though songs in browse mode was nearly impossible....taking (im estimating) 5-10 seconds to even scroll down to the next song (without attempts at loading them)

Good point AJ.

AJ this is no exaggeration... the sound literally pauses for about 10 seconds, maybe even longer. I haven't had any problems at all using the internal harddrive or cd drive, but the external USB drive using a USB 1.1 connection causes an intolerable pause in the program...

Otter have you got any other USB devices attached?

Bear in mind that the USB 1.1 bus has a quite limited bandwidth, and Scratch LIVE is _very_ bandwidth hungry, if you have multiple USB host controllers, figure out which devices are most bandwidth hungry (likely to be your HD and SLU) and install them on separate controllers.

Josh, I understand what you are saying, it will take longer to map tracks due to the bandwidth which SSL consumes, but FS also used approx. the same bandwidth (ok no mono mic signal there...) and it worked ok on my machine. So there must be an issue with SSL, or?

Yeah your reasoning makes sense to me...

I'll see if I can come up with some tests for you guys to try, hopefully we can get to the bottom of this.

Just as a thought, does a larger USB buffer help? If so whats the the minimum setting before the problem sets in?