The bad news continues I'm afraid - so far we haven't been able to keep our XP test rig here going for much longer than a fortnight on continuous playback (no stops, reboots or even Q-NXT mode changes)

This is regardless of whether we are in WDM mode or PureWave mode.

Does anyone else have any experience of running playback for this long without rebooting or even pausing at any point?

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

I've now got access to a machine that is doing nothing so can just set it going to test it for you - would a pad with a couple of hours of music, set to repeat, be a OK test? I can leave it and see what happens. . . the actual PC is stable (not been rebooted for 3 weeks, since the last batch of MS patches).

Alex

[quote:2fd98a030e=\"Peter Jarrett\"]The bad news continues I'm afraid - so far we haven't been able to keep our XP test rig here going for much longer than a fortnight on continuous playback (no stops, reboots or even Q-NXT mode changes)

This is regardless of whether we are in WDM mode or PureWave mode.

Does anyone else have any experience of running playback for this long without rebooting or even pausing at any point?[/quote]

That would be great yes - if you can intersperse some of the songs with jingles etc. that gives an even better test becuase its a mix of longer and very short pieces of audio.

Can you post here the spec of the machine as well as the details of the soundcard so we can keep track of who's using what to test?

Thanks Alex,

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

I've set up just over 14 hours of stuff on a pad. longest cart is just over an hour, there are about 10 that are between 20-40 mins and then a lot of >5mins tracks, or recorded things. There are also sweepers/jngles every couple of tracks, sweepers vary from 4 seconds to 15 seconds. I have some short jingles as well as a few 1min ones.

I just set it going now and have put it on repeat. I will check it every couple of days and let you know when it crashes!

The PC is a windows XP box, 1.6GHz celeron with 256mb of RAM. It has a Soundblaster Audigy card in it (which is routing line in --> line out, without monitoring it because this PC runs our streaming at the same time as being our SCOOP readout and editing machine. SCOOP edit is not currently running, though).

Alex

As announced in the Announcements area, we now fully support XP however I am keen to keep this thread going as at present we still can't recommend XP for mission critical stuff.

It will be very usefull for us to hear how the various tests come back. so thanks all for helping us with this :-)

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

[quote:536346743b=\"Peter Jarrett\"]It will be very usefull for us to hear how the various tests come back. so thanks all for helping us with this :-)[/quote]

I go back on Sunday so will be able to check on the status of the PC I left going then and will let you know if it is still going. . . or, more likely, what has crashed it!

Alex

Just an idea but when you use windows XP there is a compatibilty option to run software as if you are in windows 2k mode, has this been tested!?

Just thought this might be a bit of a work around?

Another thought is that if you are moving up from Microsoft XYZ to their .NET range there is normally an upgrade code function (I do not know how good this is) Has this been tried to see if .NET helps out??

Chris

I am afraid that the machine that I left running had for some reason just ceased - the pad was there, the loop icon was depressed, it was half way thriugh a pad but the carts were empty. When I clicked stop and start on the pad it says \"do you want to play after the item currently in cart 1\" (which was interesting because there was nothing in cart 1). However, when playing it had no problems using cart 1.

I have reset it and will monitor it every couple of days. Wierd!

As for the .net code I would be very suprised if it can cope with converting the sort of code you are using. I think it is designed to convert simple applications written in VB, not some of the most complicated applications written in VB (if not the most complicated). However, I would be interested to know if/whey psqured are going to start using .net - because it will involve presumably a fairly major rewrite and might be a good opportuntiy to make some changes!

Alex

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing we are seeing here too- we tend to see audio just either never loading properly, or just stopping during playback.

If you re-cue the audio it then plays fine, but unless you reboot it seems to stop again relatively quickly. After a reboot it will then run pretty well for a week or so, then stop again.

Can you have a look in the cart play logs in Myriad Manager and see for how long it ran for?

.NET wise, it is something we spent quite a while looking at but at the moment we definitely don't have any plans to start migration any time soon.

The main problems are lack of low level audio support (as .NET wants everything to go via DirectX) which means that we couldn't rewrite SmoothStream to easily run, and also a significant speed impact due to the .NET environment.

Just like most developers, our newer products are getting very graphically heay (i.e. AutoTrack 3 and the new Powerlog v4 Client) and these are only possible becuase CPU's have gotten very fast in recent years. If we moved to .NET then these suddenly get very slow again.

Now personally, I remain unconvinced that a pretty program is better than exactly the same program with a standard windows front end, but if you put those two products side by side for a comparison, guess which one get's bought?

The final clincher is that wherever possible we re-use code modules between programs so that if a problem is found while using 1 product, fixing it also fixes it in our other products.

We can't reuse the existing code in .NET as it has to be upgraded to the .NET language which then means updates have to be manually copied across each time we do something - and that is a sure way to introduce problems!

Very long term....who knows...but not just yet ;-)

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

we have been running our playout on XP Pro for over a year now and never really had any huge problems, apart from Myriad closing for no apparant reason, though I have come to the conclusion that the problem lies with our database.

XP Pro has been very stable and very reliable with Myriad if you disable all the fancy features that MS added!

With XP SP2 on the horizon, has Myriad been tested with SP2, which contains a lot of changes (mainly security related)?

I havent been able to test SP2 yet as our test machine is all but dead.

Will