Issues with Cartwall and Stutters

Archive mAirList 3.x (English)
#1

Hello,

New member to the forums here seeking a little help.

Here’s the situation:

We’ve been running mAirList for a couple years now pretty smoothly but recently “upgraded” our station PC’s to Win7Pro. Since the switch I reconfigured our interface and began using the Cartwall – very cool! The person who set up our initial system did not enable this feature for us. Anyway, here’s the main problem – our playlists run in Auto overnight and in the morning we switch to Assist. Auto plays fine and switching to Assist works too, as does adding tracks to the Playlist from the Browser. However, when trying to fire off an ID from the Cartwall player it flashes red and hangs. A restart of the program fixes the problem but that has resulted in some dead air. In addition we’ve also run into some tracks loading slowly and a couple instances of stuttering audio throughout the day.

Any ideas?

A bit on the specs: Core 2 1.86, Win7Pro 64-bit on a SSD, 2GB RAM, audio stored on second internal HD.

Thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

#2

What soundcard(s) are you using, please? And is there any other ‘non-standard’ hardware in (or connected) your PC apart from the SSD (for example: touch screens)?

BFN
Cad

#3

Hi Cad,

The soundcard is a Delta 44. No other non-standard hardware, its pretty much a bare-bones machine dedicated to running mAirList.

#4

OK, then I would search here in the forums for info. on your M-Audio card and which specific version of driver to use with it (newer is NOT always better in this case).

There seems to be a ‘correct’ version of driver for each M-Audio card, and often the later versions of drivers just don’t work as well, and can screw up when used with audio-heavy (!) programs like mAirList.

I don’t use M-Audio myself, so I can’t help any further than that.

BFN
Cad

#5

Thanks for the direction, Cad. I really appreciate your help!

Cheers!

#6

No problem, and welcome to the mAirList forums!

Please do ask if there’s anything else we can help you with.

BFN
Cad

#7

OK, so after scouring the multiple posts on Delta cards in the forums, I tried installing various older 5.x versions in Vista or XP compatibility mode in order to get the “sync/independent” option to appear. Unfortunately, either the option was not in the particular version, the installer would not allow installation, or sound did not work at all. Even with “show older versions” selected there are only 6.x versions available for Windows 7 and the 5.x for Vista 64 (which I assume is the closest relative) did not work.

I could not find any posts addressing Windows 7 compatibility and native M-Audio drivers so I’m finding myself running out of resources at this point.

:-\

#8

Try using ASIO (switch all player outputs from WDM to the respective ASIO channels on the Audio Devices page in mAirListConfig).

People have reported that ASIO works fairly well even with the newer Delta drivers.

By the way, Avid has sold the M-Audio branch lately, to a company named inMusic (which also makes the Alesis and Numark products). Perhaps that means that there will be better drivers again one day. But the opposite could happen as well.

#9

Hi Torben,

Can I use a universal driver like Asio4All or is there a particular one users have found to work?

#10

The Delta card should come with its own native ASIO driver. No need for a wrapper like ASIO4ALL.

#11

OK, under the ASIO tab the Delta was already listed as being used and is the only option.

I may need to amend the title of the post as I don’t think the problem is necessarily exclusive to the Cartwall…

I’ve run into something interesting concerning the freeze up after running overnight in Auto. We can audition before 9AM fine, but then it freezes at the top of the hour. Strange. It seems as if something happens at 9AM (which is when we switch back into Assist) and I found an event file (.mle) saved at 9:01AM which we did not do. Is this normal?

#12

Can you please report the exact version and build number of your mAirList installation? You can find it in the About dialog.

#13

Version 3.1.9 Build 989

#14

I bet you may have a driver issue. There are many known issues with the Delta 64-bit/Win7 drivers on different machines. At this stage of driver development, I wouldn’t consider Win7Pro an “upgrade.”

It sounds like the build is a nice system with Core 2 Duo, 2GB, dedicated audio HD, and dedicated machine. With those specs, XP Pro is still an excellent choice (and you’re running V3, so you’re not recording/VT). I’d have kept XP Pro until M-Audio better develops its drivers. In the past, even M-Audio recognizes that newest is not best and rolled the XP SP3 driver back to the SP2 driver because of stability issues.

Not to be critical of you, but too many people run out and upgrade before drivers and hardware have reached maturity. Mature, tested drivers do matter. Remember, some of the most expensive radio automation systems still run the “old” XP Pro as well as tested, mature drivers and there are no plans to upgrade.

Cheers, Alec M.

#15

Hi Alec,

Yeah, we would still be running our original XP system, but we had a major system failure including a corrupted boot/system HD. No XP discs to reinstall and so we were basically forced into the “upgrade.” Plus side is we can now run PT10 on our (separate) production machine but now our mAirList machine is less than stable. Hopefully some new drivers will be available once the M-Audio sale/acquisition with inMusic is complete. Although we may be looking at alternative hardware if there is something available that is comparable and reasonably priced. Any suggestions?

We do have a little external Tascam US-122MKII interface floating around, do you think that might work as a quick fix?

:-\

#16

I adjusted some of the Power Management settings in Control Panel. Seems I overlooked some of the sleep settings on the hard drives. After setting them all to never sleep, it seems the stutter problems have gone away. Its been a week now and knock on wood it hasn’t happened since.

The frozen cartwall is still happening though. Not sure what is causing this as it does not seem to be driver related.

#17

Doesn’t sound like a mAirList issue. Your software version is stable.

Cheers, Alec

#18

Is the problem resolved?

Cheers, alec m