Latest version of hoster locking up

[gduns - with the Lord]

Has anyone experienced Hoster Locking up completely after about 3 hours. There doesnt seem to be a pattern, or a certian song it does it on. it was after a customer quit singing. nothing worked. mouse didnt move etc. cntrl, alt, delete...... and end hoster then restart. then it worked the rest of the night.

[MTUSUPPORT]

Gary,
It sounds like you are stating the entire computer was locked up. Normally from my Experience, when you get a "Hard Lockup" it leans more towards hardware.

What happens if you just run the computer for that amount of time, without Hoster Running? Just trying to come up with some ideas on how to diagnose this.

[gduns - with the Lord]

Brian,
The computer appears to lock up, even the mouse. But conrtol alt delete will bring it out. It has never done this with anything except hoster. and only twice(in the 2 months I have been using hoster). It says hoster not responding. But I still have the other lookup issue if I use the downarrow on a song search. Neither are a big deal, but I thought you would like to know. Btw since I have upgraded to i gig ram and changed to an audiology card, I can now have media player off and minimized in the background. to play intermissions. I was having interupt conflicts till i rearranged some I/O. I had the video, sound, network & raid controller all on the same irq. But now that I separated it they work much better.

[MTUSUPPORT]

Glad to hear it GDuns.

I will take a look into this problem. I have a system that I can let play over night, so I will let it play over night tonight, and see if I can get it to lock. This may not be a true test though, because it will just being playing straight through and not as if someone was running a show.

I am going to have them try to fix that other error that you were reporting with your Songs.mdb database also. I still have that to be fixed.

[nreel]

My computer hasn’t just stopped responding after 3-4 hours of operation, but I have experienced these types of problems.

I started using Hoster at shows (5 4-hour shows/week) three weeks ago.

In the beginning, I used the Auto Play and Retained the Play List.

I got four (4) lockups the first night. I was able to clear each lockup by clicking on the "X" and restarting Hoster.

As the night went on, I tried to STOP the playing song before its actual end time, as well as, cleared the Play List of Played Songs within 2 or 3.

By doing this, I had no more lockups. I did not use the Song Search by Artist or Song Title the first night.

The second night, I set the Play List to Delete the Song after Play and Set the Play to Manuel.

No lockups occurred.

The third night, I tried the Song Search Tabs and experienced several lockups. So, I never use this function. I have Access running in the background and use my own database if I need to search for a song.

Recently, I have noticed that XP Pro will not shut down at the end of the show when I am ready to turn the computer OFF.

I push and Hold the Power Button until it Powers Down. I have Norton Utilities and Windoctor doesn't find anything wrong.

Last Sunday August 17, I experienced a complete crash whereby I had to reboot the computer.

Two things occurred. One, I queued a song that was (I found out the next day when I had time to troubleshoot the problem) a Track 15 of a multisession Sound Choice Disk where, before knowing better (I thought I had found and repaired all these problems), I used the old "open-the-tray when the Status meter stops responding" trick to Import. The song showed the SC Splash Screen and then went blank with the music playing in the background - no graphics (words) on the Singer's monitor or Computer Display.

I closed Hoster and reopened thinking this would clear the problem and got the same result.

Two, since I closed Hoster, a song that I placed in the Song List from a Singer's personal CDG (add CD track) got removed from Cache.

So, while I was trying to get the SC Track 15 song to work, every time I hit Play, the Dialog Box to ADD CD Trk would POPUP - very annoying when you are in the middle of something else (of course I kept closing that dialog box because I wasn’t ready to deal with that particular problem, yet, and, because that dialog box was blocking my view).

Finally, the Singer wanted to sing a different song. I queued a different song and I got horizontal lines through everything.

I closed and reopened Hoster to see if this would clear the horizontal line problem but this did not work. Again, the ADD CD Trk dialog box came up and it was at this point Hoster locked completely - keyboard - computer.

These are the "Lockup" experiences I have encountered and I still say, "I wouldn't go back to physical CDGS for nuttin' in the world.

Norm

[SteveWalker]

nreel, You neglected to tell us:

1. What type of PC that you have?
2. What OS you are using?
3. How much RAM memory you have?
4. What other programs are running along with Hoster?
5. How well you maintain your PC such as defrag, virus detection, etc.?
6. How well your PC works when running other programs?

Are you an experienced you are as a PC user or a beginner? Experienced or not, you need to begin troubleshooting your problem. You can start by addressing the above 6 questions.

Best of luck. :)

Steve

[gduns - with the Lord]

I used to recommend defragging often. But with hoster I had a problem the other night. I had a show a few nights after I had defragged, and I had a couple of songs that were "combined" during the defrag. The words were ok, but the music was a compilation of two songs interlaced. really strange.

[SteveWalker]

Originally posted by gduns
the music was a compilation of two songs interlaced. really strange. [/B]

I assume you have a backups of your karaoke files that you can compare to (sizes, etc.) to troubleshoot the problem?

Steve

[gduns - with the Lord]

I have a couple of usb 2.0 80 gig hard drives I back up to so restoreing wasnt bad, but I dont use defrag like i used to anymore. it isnt bulletproof. I used xp's internal defrag. I am afraid of nortons also I have seen problems with it in the past. I guess I think the safest thing to do is defrag, then copy from the BACKUP to the freshly defragged hard drive. that seems to keep the files contingous.

[pcgumshoe]

Question on the Defrag... I don't do it much any more with XP, but isn't there a way you can establish to set certain files sizes get ignored? or was that just in one of those Norton Products.

As to the hang-ups... I have been working on a system for a while (not my final system, just the import songs system). I too have noticed a "CRASH" not really a hang. I get asked to error report and I don't (forgot to turn that off). Well here is my question, how many people out there that are claiming that they are having crashes are used Nero. One would think that if this were a real problem it would show up in more cases.

I know that Nero has released version 6 and I haven't gotten it yet and I am wondering if there might be a conflict that has been overlooked completely. Why did windows have to pull the ASPI thingy anyway.

My crashes don't take 3 or 4 hours, just after a while of playing. I don't have the time right yet to focus on it as I don't believe that this will be my show system.

Audigy Card seems to work for everyone, any more professional cards being used? Say in the $400-$800 range? How about USB?

[gduns - with the Lord]

I dont have nero, or any other cdrom burning program loaded on this computer. I have seen to many conflicts between them. Especially roxio. But as far as the high end audio board why would one spend $4-800.00 for an audio board to use just 2 outputs on. the audiology it has 100db s/n ratio, I dont think any could beat that much. but I am willing to listen to your reasoning.

[gduns - with the Lord]

add hd track, lookup by song use your down arrow key to scroll. it will totally crash, Burn & Exit.

[pcgumshoe]

Well, higher end audio board would allow for assigning multiple channels out and multiple channels in. If one wanted to record audio on the fly in tracks, say singer and audio track and then mix it down better after the fact. Also, when using multiple channels of audio out for things like DJ/Filler music vs. Karaoke.

I guess coming from the "ADLIB" board days, I consider these boards to be, well less than capable of working in a stressful environment.

I will try the crash burn and exit test... I usually use a mouse...

[Wayne White]

I tried what dguns said on my MTU laptop, which is the most stable of my 3 systems for some reason. I can scroll through the song tab either with a drop down box or just holding down on the arrow & it doesn't crash. I'll try the other 2 systems when they are home.

Wayne

[gduns - with the Lord]

I was told it was in the database, maybe so! It always crashed when I hit the Monster mash.

[kedmison]

I've tried what you did gduns, but my laptop didn't crash either. I tried using the database pull downs when I first started but still prefer my Excel running in the back ground. It doesn't cause any problems either. However I have 1 gig of memory too.

Kelly

[pcgumshoe]

I had to bring all my kma files to my home system and I will try to ***** what you have.