Weird problem

[Lonman]

I have been running Hoster in my show for just over a year now on the same tower. Completely built for music - dual core pentium, 2 gb ram, mirrored hard drives, not on the interent, Hoster dedicated, Windows 2000 with SP4 & all updates. Works fine for the most part until recently...read on. The last few weeks or so, i've had songs that normally play just fine just STOP for absolutely no reason. Try to restart & they stop again. Reboot the computer & the file plays perfectly. A few days go by & other songs just stop. Files fine after a reboot. A full year went by without anything more than an occasional hiccup that a reboot wouldn't cure. Now it's becoming almost a nighltly event where some song is going to stop in the midst & need to either play off disc while rebooting the computer or move to another song.
Has anyone experienced anything remotely similar & what did you do (or would you try) to correct it?

[ddouglass]

Try running Checkdisc and defrag. This will clean up the disc drive to make it faster and refresh the TOC. Could be that the drive is getting lost and looking in the wrong place for the next sector. What version of Hoster do you have on it?

[marklwood]

I, like Dale, would lean toward hardware failure. I would have suggested memtest86 (tells you how old I am) an old DOS utility that I used to use to diagnose intermittent memory failure. After a quick search I found http://www.memtest.org/download/2.01...+-2.01.iso.zip
Seems someone else liked it too and has been updating it to keep up with new CPUs and chipsets. Burn it to a disk and boot from the CD. That way you don't introduce anything to your pristine computer.

[swany]

Windows XP 2000, MTU built rack mount. Ran over two years without one problem. One day while using the windows media player it would get into a song and reboot the PC. Sometimes you would get 20 seconds into it sometimes 30 minutes. I play DJ and KJ at all my gigs. I use the Media Player and like it for DJ. The hoster saved me that night because it worked flawlessly, and I used it for the DJ to finish the night. I tried and tried to resolve the problem. Ultimately, I wound up taking it out of the DJ cart I mounted it in, and brought it in put it on line, upgraded from WMP10 to WMP11, went from Hoster 3.317 to 3.321 all is well. Kind of like the meat in a burger at a fast food joint, it's a mystery. Defragging is good, if you still have a lot of the clutter that came with the pc I would get rid of it first. Things like the student version of microsoft whatever. You don't go online, no problem you don't need all the extra ways to get on the net all I ever use is the big blue E. Sample pictures, videos, music, all warning sound except for the PCs internal battery. Programs you don't use, most often you don't need. They take up space and time.

[Beavis]

when all else fails, i reformat.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by Beavis

when all else fails, i reformat.

I didn't want to give him the bad news yet, but unfortunately Windows (all versions but especially 2000) gets slower and uses more memory/page file and registry space the longer you run it.

[billyo]

i just bought a new music editing program, and i read that if a sudden lost of audio or audio just stop in the mid. of a song, according to the troubleshooting manual it's usually the memory is getting low, or something to that effect...( hope i read the manual right ) and also manual said to check the audio setting and see if the wave volume is up..

[marklwood]

Originally Posted by Lonman

The last few weeks or so, i've had songs that normally play just fine just STOP for absolutely no reason. Try to restart & they stop again. Reboot the computer & the file plays perfectly.

When you initially play a song, it is read into memory. If there is a bad "spot" in the memory, the song will hang without even showing an error. After a reboot, you clear the memory of any bits. Then when you reload the same song, it is in a different section of the memory and reads fine.

Originally Posted by Lonman

Now it's becoming almost a nighltly event where some song is going to stop in the midst & need to either play off disc while rebooting the computer or move to another song.
Has anyone experienced anything remotely similar & what did you do (or would you try) to correct it?

Memory problems are the hardest to diagnose, that is why I linked you to the memtest program. It is virtually impossible to re-create the error at will. Where as a hard drive problem can usually be re-created. The # of sectors that are bad will continue to fail at an accellerating rate. If you have spares yoou could just swap them out and see if that fixes the problem. I would hate to see you start back from scratch only to have the problem come creeping back.

[Lonman]

Well I did a defrag tonight on all drives, they didn't look that bad, but there was some red stripes showing. Also deleted all temp files as someone pm'd me stating this could be a possible cause as well. I will try the mem test if it happens again. Did a hard drive test & it displays healthy.

[Lonman]

Originally Posted by Lonman

Well I did a defrag tonight on all drives, they didn't look that bad, but there was some red stripes showing. Also deleted all temp files as someone pm'd me stating this could be a possible cause as well. I will try the mem test if it happens again. Did a hard drive test & it displays healthy.

Well none of that worked. Song stopped about 20 minutes into show, this time Hoster wouldn't restart, everything else worked fine - luckily I have my discs and was able to run the show the rest of the night.
Will try to redownload/reinstall Hoster first. Don't have any other operating systems to work with at this time to upgrade Windows to XP.

[Lonman]

So reinstalling Hoster didn't work - rebooted the computer before the show, had a song stop tonight about 45 minutes into the show, rebooted & all was well for the rest of the night. Guess I will have to purchase a new version of Windows & hope that's the problem.

[Lonman]

OK, update, i'm thinking it could have been a bad download? I reinstalled 3.315 - what I had on the tower before updating & all went perfectly tonight. So I will try to take the 3.321 code from my home computer & give that a shot.

[Lonman]

Well it must be in the computer afterall. I had a song stop tonight in the 3rd hour with the old code. So now I am trying to get a copy of XP to update, then if need be, my hard drives.