Long pause before song starts.
 

Used Hoster 4.06 for the first time in a show Saturday. One problem I have had is occasionally since using any 4.xxx version when pressing the play button there is a long pause before the song plays. It is not on every song. What I have been doing to get over this is press the play as soon as I call up the next singer so while I am waiting for them to fight their way through the crowds I can cue it up on the intro screen and pause until the singer is ready. Never had this with 3.xxx.

If your songs were imported from ZIP files then the long pause is Hoster having to unzip them before they can be played.

I have no zip files imported on my computer, have never used zips. Some are mp3+g. Next time I will check if it is these. Most of mine are imported direct from cd+g.

Roy, have you double-checked the "Delay" time? Maybe it got re-set from the way you had it set on a previous version. If you set it to "0", songs will start much quicker.

Roy define "long" delay for us.
Are you using Manual or Automatic play?
Where are your KMA files located?
How big is your C: drive and how much free space is on it?
These are all things that can slowdown the operations.

Hi Gerri
Thanks for your response, I was under the impression that time delay is only active when in auto mode. I have it set for a 3 second delay but only use auto when I need to use the toilet and I'm generally back before it comes into play so disable again.

Answer for Dale
Since I wrote about this problem I have been on the Dell web site and downloaded a driver update for my sound card (Sigma Tel Audio). I have been trying hard to get the same problem since then and it has only happened twice after a lot of tries. when doing my show is was happening about every third song. But to answer your questions just in case it starts again here are my answers
Time delay was between 7 & 10 seconds, I am in manual mode, my kma files are about 5000 on my C drive which is 55 GB with 11 GB free, and about 9000 on my external 149GB with 46 GB free, they are in the spec below. I am also using the old video player but it was happening in the new one as well.

The reason I am using the old player is I seem to get a lot of jitter with the new one on video. If I play some video's on the new player by the time the track reaches the end on the second display the preview screen is still showing about 10 seconds behind it.

I am thinking about trying to roll back to media player 9 to see if this cures that problem.

Thanks again for your responses.

Sounds like you have most of the problem cured. If it was me though I would move more of the KMA files to the external drive. The reason I say this is how full you internal drive is. The minimum free space on a C:\ drive should be no less than 25% which for this drive would be about 13.5GB. Ideally it should around 40 to 50% though. The operating system needs this space to be able to function at its fastest. Just a suggestion, but that could help with the rest of the delay.
A good defrag after you move some of them wouldn't hurt either drive though.

Duplicate post.

Hi Dale

Thanks for that suggestion, I will move them all over to my external drive later when I get some free time.

I think I may have found the answer to my original problem of long delay.
I went to my external hard drive properties & opened the policies tab where there is 2 options optimize for quick removal which was Selected & optimize for performance which I changed to. I have noticed a big difference in the performance since doing this. Fingers crossed this is what it was.

Nice catch. I would assume the quick removal option would read the file into memory before playing so you wouldn't lose it if you unplugged.