I just thought that when this is all happening, I would be able to copy this behaviour by just using Engine#1;
Ok, just found something is really wrong with the latest version regarding this because it will just play all the tracks in the Playlist in paralellel, but anyway with one track in there, nothing is the matter ?? (note this would be Direct Sound).

I am not sure what the conclusion must be from this ... (at all)

Then I tried Foobar/WASAPI ... -> no problem.
Back to XX Engine#3 again (WASAPI) and after that Foobar Direct Sound -> no problem.

So what this comes to, is that you have something going on, I have not.
And no, I didn't try Foobar/ASIO.

But what ASIO did you use ? real ASIO, or ASIO4All ??
Similar would be Kernel Streaming; on Vista it officially does not exist without emulation (although I got it running some while ago in plain bit perfect mode).




PS: In all occasions I used the smallest buffer size possible.

Hey all,

I finally got around to install my SSD (Solid State Disk) which I had been laying around for several months now. The OS (still Vista SP0) is on there, as well as the Galleries.

After only a few hours of listening I 'd swear the highs are more delicate, but I sure would put some money on the bass having more authority. So, not knowing of another vocabulary of superlatives, I plainly say this is just another improvement.
Please note this is in the environment of not using a pre-amp, where everything is, say, 10 times more profound and more difficult regarding the highs. It already wasn't fatigueing (at all), but the highs tell me this is another leap in being able to play loud without a sense of disturbance.

My main Gallery (comprising of some 11,000 albums by now) loads in 10 seconds doing that the first time after a boot (avoiding cache interfearance), which - to my estimation - was twice as long before.

On a side note, the SSD is IDE (ATA) connected through an IDE-SATA converter (note the decent SSDs are all SATAI) giving no inherit performance degradation, while giving me the space to have mounted 9 DATAII disks (8 internal -, 1 eSata connected) plus the 1 SATAI (64GB) disk where the OS resides.
Awaitening 2GB HDDs, the next step would be a SATAII multiplexor (4 disks to one SATAII channel), knowing that I wouldn't loose on bandwidth since no two SATAII disks would be used at any same time, unless for backup reasons.

To my surprise (or maybe not) the SSD gets fairly hot when intensively used as it was at restoring the OS to it, but is completely cold now it is just "standing by", *knowing* the OS never leaves it alone for more that 4-6 minutes. This, where the normal HDD would keep on spinning forever, hence consuming the power forever, the SSD just proving by her being cold it just matters (for PSU interfearance !).

What's next ?

And what if you leave the priority settings untouched ? (so, set to Nothing, reboot (!), play XX #3 and then use the other players).

Oh, that wasn't much clear to me before.
And you are sure you still use the single core processor for this ? (with multi core all is to be interpreted differently).

Ok. Whatever you do, please also try it at first clearing the Playlist Area (press the Clear button) and then load track in there.

If this doesn't help, try Attended (press Clear again) and Unattended in that sequence.
Please let me know (and try to keep track of the subsequent activities you applied).
Thanks,
Peter

Ok, I must look into this, but the picture of the error message really would help;

Just press "Additional Options" at the bottom, and then click Browse. From there you can upload the picture from your local drive (or whereever your have it). Please try that ...

Ok, RSS this :

(and let me know whether it works in all cases -> should deal with MP3 just the same)


Save your old XXHighEnd.exe from your current XX folder just in case, and put the one in below zip in there.
Edit : - in your current XX 0.9w-2 folder ! (otherwise things will not work)

Hey ... I recall the same reports from either XMPlay or Foobar !
If you want ... you may Google for it (somehow). But I'm fairly sure I recall reading that (might be 4-6 weeks ago, and I think it was about Foobar).

Nothing about blaming or "can't help it", but it might prove that it just happens when WASAPI has been used ... *also* meaning that when WASAPI itself obviously isn't affected, it just may cause it ...
Andrey, if you can't (or just won't) come up with this whereever thread, I will try to find it myself. Later ...
And anyway I will try to find the solution. Keep in mind though that this looks a bit similar as unticking those two checkboxes in the driver ("Aplications can control this device exclusively" and "Give applications with exclusive mode priority" (similar). Once unticked, you can't tick them and use exclusive mode again -> only a reboot helps.

Hmm ...

Hmm ... There is a thread somewhere (in here) where I related the "pending" hybernate (whatever ) state to something else, which I forgot now.
This might prove this is just so. Maybe you know that thread, or otherwise I must try to find it. It may be important ...
I mean, important for those who find their PC kind of "destroyed" for other means of playback.

Andrey, is this general ? I mean, ASIO, Kernel Streaming, DSound just as well ? (I don't ask you to try this all, but you just might know it already).

"That error", but what error ??

Hi Andrey,

As said, this is about the other processes, because XX will arrange it for herself, and in the mean time tries to arrange it for her environment as good as possible.

This can be seen / understood probably the most easy by searching Google for Quad core problems, and the unextpected relatively low performance of those, opposed to the dual cores. In general 2 x 2 = 4, but the performance of the Quad stays at just over 2 (it is maybe 8 months ago I investigated things around this).
Note that these problems emerge(d) at the digital audio workstation softare (Cubase et al), which softare similarly to XX tries to utilize the processor to the max, for obvious reasons in there.

I too have tried to utilize the 4 cores, but failed. I mean, there is no (to me ovbious) means to spread unknown tasks over 4 cores. And the contrary, with two cores this is easy : XX on one, the rest on the other.

When this is out of proper control, the OS determines which process (thread) goes to where, and this is just based on capacity. It does, however, *not* include the calculation of the overhead at switching a process from one core to the other, or better : moving a process out of focus (time slicing) in order to let another in. And now the big trick : when swithing happens, the processors' own memory has to be replaced as well (the memory is decidated to the process running), and it is there where it goes wrong. Careful : my thoughts, and possibly nothing you can read somewhere.

All together I am not sure how it exactly works, but when e.g. two processes need the cpu, the two will take longer when running together opposed to run them subsequently. Compare with two processes needing near 100% disk I/O (not SSD) : each process needs its own head position, and the overhead of that determines the throughput time. Run the processes after eachother, and they can be 100 times more fast easily.
The positioning of the disk head can be compared to the copying of the processor's memory. It takes time and that time is overhead.
"Trashing" would be the situation that the overhead becomes larger than the net time needed without the overhead and can't catch up.

On the latter : Keep in mind that XX dedicates a core to herself, therewith giving the other processes twice as less change (dual core) to come through within the time needed (whatever that is, but the "swapfile" thread is an example of this, solved by temporarily allowing that process to use two cores).

Ah, hard to explain it all for me, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
Peter

A longer time ago I told about this "feature", although I never realized this happens because of auto-restart of the front-end. But :

I don't think I will solve this, because my current Vista (still SP0) will go to sleep when I don't want that. Also, it is out of control because of bugs in SP0. So, it "solves" those bugs ...

On the other hand, I wouldn't know what to solve. Ok, *unless* it is really true that auto-bringing up XXHighEnd does that job, because then I could make an option that it won't do that anymore (which should solve your problem).

In any case I am not aware of anything explicit in there that causes this.


PS: My PC always keeps running, and I want that. The hybernate (or which ever state it exactly is and which I can't tell because I did not order for it) doesn't always end up in a proper restore after waking up. I forgot the examples, but for some (type of) SATAII disks just getting detached. Quite annoying !

PPS: Yesterday I have been working on moving the OS to a proven working backup (which failed so far) which will give me the opportunity to a. go to SP1 and b. install the english language as per your advise in the other thread. Then I will be able to judge better the current (= SP1) normal situation. I'll proceed on this ASAP.

Hi,

Can you make that picture working please ? And since I don't know how informative the picture is, can you please tell me what you are exactly doing with what kind of file and with what settings ?

If you installed XX in the Program Files folder that wil most probably your problem.
And take care that you have uplevelled administrator rights !

Peter

Ok, then I'll dive into the FLAC-Track solution afterall.