New Version Problems

[cartunesdj]

I had a gig tonight and was plagued with a number of problems using the latest version of Hoster.

The first thing I noticed was a very bad lag. When putting in the song number, normally it shows the name of the song right away but not tonight. It took around 5 to 10 seconds before I could tab down to enter the singers name.

I noticed that during this time, the program became unresponsive and the mouse pointer would disappear anytime it was over the program. Everything else in my system seemed to be fine. It was only Hoster that was having issues.

Opening the search dialog box and entering a song name would have the same results...only a much longer pause with the mouse pointer turning to an hourglass.

It seems like anytime the program had to access the hard-drive it did this.

Also, while a singer was singing, I tried to add a track from another singers CD. I got a fatal error Windows dialog box that popped up over Hoster asking if I wanted to report it to Microsoft. Since the current song continued to play, I did nothing until it was done. I then clicked the 'don't send' button. The dialog box and Hoster both closed immediately.

I restarted Hoster and was only able to add tracks from the singers disc while no songs were playing.

It was a very frustrating and upsetting night. I've been using Hoster for quite awhile now without anything like this happening.

Any ideas what could be happening?

By the way, all Microsoft updates had been done (except SP3), and the drive was completely defragmented earlier this week.

Also, I checked task manager while Hoster was running and the cpu load and memory looked normal.

Whatever is happening, I need to have it fixed a.s.a.p. (before the next gig).

[cartunesdj]

Is it possible to rollback to an earlier version to see if these issues will go away?

If so, how would I go about doing that?

[ddouglass]

It is possible if you still have the setup file for the earlier version. MTU does not keep those where we can download them. That is why they say to save them in a safe place.

If Hoster has been running ok until last night then think about what if anything you have done since the last time you used it before. Could be something you changed or added that may have triggered the slowdown.
Have you tried running Chckdisk to see if the drive may have any bad sectors popping up? Those can give you fits and have you chasing your own tail.
I would recommend you go ahead and do the SP3 update. I don't think it has anything to do with this problem but it can't hurt.
Try un-installing and re-installing Hoster and see if that clears it up. Rebuilding the database wouldn't hurt either as the database file may have a problem in it that is slowing down its response to the program.

[Joe Nieves]

I've seen this Behavior when drive is badly fragged or registry needs cleaning.
I would recommend trying this first.

Joe...

[cartunesdj]

Thanks for the reply ddouglass. You're always a wealth of information.

I don't know if you're the same, but sometimes in a state of frustration I don't always think clearly (especially after a long night). I knew I could count on y'all to bring some clarity.

I'm thinking re-install and re-build might be the best bet once everything else is checked out. It really seems to be program related (as opposed to a system issue) since Hoster was the only program having issues. (I also run OtsDJ to play background music and videos between singers. It's always run flawlessly with Hoster.)

Oh, one of the other issues it was having was I absolutely could not change the pitch of any song. This has never been a problem before either. I tried changing the A, B, C audio selection thang and it made no difference. If I entered a song with even just a -1, the song would stutter very bad. As soon as I would click '0' while the song was playing, it would clear up. Real bummer to one of my singers that wanted every song "down one".

[cartunesdj]

So I get the gig machine out. Get it all setup. Boot Windows, load Hoster, and guess what...no issues.

Now I really don't know what to think. I've started other applications, played videos in OtsDJ. Come back to Hoster...running fine. No lag, key change working fine, searches are as fast as ever.

So now I'm concerned about what to do at the next gig when it happens again.

Since I can't determine the root cause or find a definite resolution, I'm left with a big question mark in my mind.

The one thing I wasn't able to do last night at the gig was reboot. I shut down and restarted Hoster a number of times without any change. Maybe a reboot would have fixed it. Buy why?

And how do you gracefully go about rebooting your machine after the show has started?

I really love using Hoster and have impressed many people over the years with it. But this uncertainty is enough to give me an ulcer.

Guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed that this was a fluke.