Stereo Tool

I'm running version 7.24 on a custom built computer running Windows 7. Have a solid state hard drive. This lashup ran fine for almost two months and the computer froze. Rebooting the sound card via the program did nothing. I had to reboot the box. The same thing happened again about an hour ago. It's been about three weeks since the first incident. Any suggestions as to why this is happening? Restarting the sound card did nothing. The card I'm using is the M-Audio Audiophile 192. The CPU load never goes over 30%

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We improve things by making them worse.

- cpu ?
- mb
- other programs?
- etc..

But that's win7 I can always bet on it.

Silly question, but did you check for viruses? I would suspect hard drive or memory issues, I run xp pro 32, just don't care for win7 for ST.I would scan the drive for possible issues and do a memtest.SSD actually have a fairly high failure rate that sellers don't mention.Of the ssd,i prefer the intel.good luck.

It's not on the internet, only an in-house network. No viruses. I've turned off just about everything else on this box which was built solely to run Stereo Tool. I have a monitor and keyboard/trackball mouse for it. I don't leave the monitor connected and as of yesterday no longer leave the USB keyboard connected. When I get in this morning, I can see what kind of CPU I am using. There is an 80gig SSHD in the box. And it is Windows 7.

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We improve things by making them worse.

So restarting ST doesn't help? If it would be a bug in ST, then it should be gone when you restart ST, otherwise it's something else...

Since you mention restarting the sound card (?), does that mean that everything works except the sound card? And if you restart ST you get a sound card error? If so, my guess would be that there's a sound card driver issue. As far as I know there there are not that many ST users who use the M-Audio Audiophile 192 - so I cannot tell you how reliable it is.

- Can you check the Windows event log?
- Do you know if there's ever a sound card restart on your system? That happens if a buffer gets empty. And it's the only moment when something 'difficult' happens (not just for ST but potentially also for the sound card driver) - the rest of the time the same processing happens over and over, dozens of times per second; if there would be a problem with that it's not likely that it would run for months before something went wrong.

This is bit confusing. How can you restart soundcard when it's frozen?

The event log does show something (a reboot) happening at the time it failed. Specifically, it was Event ID 41, Task Category 63.

My computer has:
A Corsair Nova 2 SSHD
Intel Core .7-3770 3.4ghz CPU
3.5 gigs of total physical memory, with the maximum virtual memory being 6.9 gigs.

I found a thread on the internet written by a Japanese guy about some bugs in Windows 7:

http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~the_imai/et ... 41_en.html

I followed his instructions, although I did not see any battery-related commands.

One thing I'm going to change is the output buffer size. I now have it at .999 seconds, which is about as tight as it can be set. I may loosen it up some since there is way too much delay for off-air monitoring as it is.

Hope some of this helps...

Bojcha, I tried to restart the sound card but could not because the program was frozen. I meant to go back and edit out that line!

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We improve things by making them worse.

Now I'm confused. Before you said that you needed to reboot the pc, now you say that the program was frozen. So, does that mean that (1) you had to kill Stereo Tool and could then start it again, or (2) was the whole system frozen, or (3) did restarting Stereo Tool not solve the problem?

In case 1: Sounds like a problem in Stereo Tool
In case 2: Sounds like a hardware or driver issue
In case 3: Sounds like a driver problem.

I was unable to restart Stereo Tool without rebooting the computer. The screen was frozen and discolored. No commands could be given (no buttons pushed).

I'm going to go out to the shack to check a couple of things...

OK, the CPU usage is 20-22%. The physical memory is at 28%. I bumped the output buffer from .999 to 1.1

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We improve things by making them worse.

Discolored? Do you have a video card, and can it be that it got too hot? Are you running Stereo Tool minimized or visible? If it's visible some video cards can get hot because of the screen updates - if you have a good one or a built-in one that should never be a problem.

I've seen something like this in the past with a video card with bad cooling. If possible, I would advise to always use the on-board video card, which normally isn't such a 'beast' that can get very hot. In my experience one of the things that breaks most in a pc is a video card.