I don’t experience crashes often, but sometimes they happen, and for no explicable reason. That’s fine, bound to happen eventually, but I’ve experienced some problems afterward that happen consistently enough to be worth reporting.
The first and most annoying issue is that ASIO4ALL seems to hang after a crash, repeating it’s last sample buffer, making it impossible to play any sound from other programs. I try to forcibly end the process with task manager, but ASIO doesn’t have it’s own process, and as it turns out, Renoise itself is still running! This ‘ghost’ application can’t be ended either, I’ve even tried taskkill from the command line, but to no avail. It greedily holds onto it’s memory, playing that last sample buffer, and all I can do is restart my laptop. (It seems after waiting some 10? minutes, the process has ended while I am typing this, still this is obviously undesirable behavior )
Surely somebody else has noticed this?
x86 Windows 7 - I can give other specs if necessary.
i really suggest getting an external sound interface with real asio drivers for your laptop. they are not expensive and give you more pro results when it comes to latency!
If Renoise cannot be killed, most likely the driver is blocked against being taken down. Since only Windows manages drivers at their lowest level, there might be a reason the driver is kept up (preventing BSOD or something worse).
It is not nice to have to reboot, but you meanwhile can close your other applications and perhaps save some work.
Why the driver locks up is something inside ASIO4ALL. You could perhaps raise the buffers a bit, it might be choking on a too small buffer size or there might be something else going on. It is most likely not something Renoise can guard itself against. Also Platform kernel decisions are no things that Renoise can match up against. And closing down a program without releasing the drivers will not solve the issue because the driver will remain locked by the system (so you would have to reboot regardless).
Back in the old days , when I didn’t have an external soundcard , killing asio 4 all would give bsod ( depending on application .)
Now , when renoise hangs , I can unplug my soundcard ( edirol ua 25 ) and instantly kill the process without bsod .
Upgrading to a decent soundcard is a wise move
)