[solved] Mystical Stop-downs on new PC with Renoise

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hello.

I have encountered the most irritating error a software could obtain.

While using renoise, everything runs smoothly for a few minutes (in a range of 2-5), then the whole screen (sometimes even the mouse) freezes for 1-2 minutes! the song keeps on playing (song- or patternwise, depends on how it was played before the freeze), then it consinues working.

Needless to mention, this renders a decent work impossible, what can be a reason for this? any valuable advice will be welcome.

some details:

  • the sound card drivers and directx are properly installed (worths a re-install tho… i will consider)
  • i used a laptop before, the VSTs were just copied there. they are copied on this regular PC as well, so it can’t be the root of the problem.
  • when the GUI freezes, it does not respond to alt-tab for like 40 seconds, then it does, but the gui still freezes for approx. a minute.
  • basically other softwares run fine on my pc.
  • i met this error in version 1.9.1, i installed the new beta version, it does the same there.
  • while i listen to the picked-up noise on my headphones while the freezing lasts, i can hear 5 quiet impulses repeating every 5-6 seconds. could be a hint. So it is like “tak-tak-tak-tak-tak–…tak-tak-tak-tak-tak–…”
  • other softwares are Not running (only NOD32, never caused a harm tho)

please help, before an other keyboard breaks and dies (yeeaahh, probably i am having some anger issues…)

thx

nagz

2

some minor details in addition:

  • i am running Win XP sp2, recently updated itself to sp3 but the error appeared before that as well.

  • upon the freezing, the song keeps on playing in my headphones, if i keep touching many keys while it lasts, the playback glitches for 1 second, then the playback proceeds. weird, isn’t it?

  • sometimes it occurs when the playback is stopped so it is definitely not an overload / CPU capacity problem.

  • i have had Renoise running on this configuration years ago too, never had such issues.

  • important note: the cpu is NOT overclocked.

thanks again, awaiting your replies.

3

tried changing from asio to directsound?
just to see if the same thing happens

4

ASIO is not an option, i use the shitty AC97 so it is at default. it does not even work with ASIO now.

5

Unfortunately I have no clue what this could be, so I just can give you some ideas ideas/things you could try:

  • Try using ASIO4All with your AC97 -> http://www.asio4all.com/ then we do at least know if its a DirectX related problem or not.

  • You may try if dis/enabling a capture device in Renoise makes a difference with DirectX

  • Select the DirectX driver explicitly in Renoises Audio preferences instead of using the “Primary Audio Device”

  • Is there anything useful, any hint about some problems in the Renoise log.txt?

  • Have you tried if enabling/disabling the “more compatible GFX updates” in the Renoise GUI preferences makes a difference?

  • Do you have any DirectX based games installed on that machine? Do they behave the same way after a while?

6

You could also try to shutdown the indexing service and/or the new windows search thingie.

7

I’ve experiened such problems in the past as well, that was a capacity problem of harddrive speed while some process was very busy on it (virusscanner or similar)
Is your harddrive showing a lot of activity when this happens?

8

thanks for all the ideas, i am going through them one by one and will keep you reported.

btw. the title of this thread is wrong, this is NOT a new PC. in fact it is pretty old, but was working with renoise in the last year.

9

ok dudes, the first thing i tried is “use more compatibile GFX updates”, seems like it is working! (but god is my witness (lol) i tried it before!)

thanks guys, you will all be rewarded with my new piece of crap i am working on :D

but seriously, thanks all (this will be an official Sanagi remix tho, can’t explain how stressed i am haha:)

10

Glad that you found the problem. Its strange though that more and more drivers neglect to work with the “non compatible” updates option. Guess we should better make the compatible one the default…

11

perhaps :)