Good news at last ... it is all SOLVED. Well, I'm very confident in that at least. There is some explanation here : XXHighEnd Model 0.9v-6 (solves silent playback)

I want to thank everybody who took the time to test and report, and especially those who feld bad about it, but hung on.

As this thread shows it took over 3 months to solve it, and in the end it really needed all the information to get the clues.
Of course I must thank Russ for his explicit testing and detailed descriptions, which just gave me the hunches about where to look.

at last ... (see Wav stops playing)

Thanks to the great help of Calibrator / Russ who seems to have a PC prone to these problems and his encouragement to build in detailed log facilities which he then wanted to run over his system, the following problems were solved :

First of all the silent playback of course;

At Attended Playback at completely random moments a track would play "silent". The cursor from XXHighEnd just running, but no sound during one track. After that the next track produced sound again, and after a few tracks it could happen again.
Somehow this seemed to occur right after a reboot only, and sure not with everyone ...
This was not related to the sound device acting weird, not was it Vista doing it ... it was a stupid programming mistake related to the time one process (in XXHighEnd) needed to complete a "situation" and the other process (in XXEngine3) running in parallel not taking into account that XXHighEnd possibly only started the situation, instead of looking at the finishing of it. So, XXEngine3 fell in the middle of that process, all coming down to partially lacking the data to perform the job right. This included the data for the Wallpaper process (which was proven a stage earlier already without knowing the cause) and which so far was solved by means of a backdoor solution (not treating the cause).

The reason why not everybody encountered the problem layed in the intrinsic "speed" of the PC, that, when fast enough, was able to finish the one process faster, hence making the chance the other process falling in the middle of it, smaller. And that's why a laptop was more prone to it ...
Also the phenomenon of it happening right after a reboot is explained now, because Vista will be organizing things for quite some times after a boot. In the end though, it was proven that it kept on happening, but in a fasion less likely to notice;

Beforementioned "partially lacking the data to perform the job right" could come down to not knowing the tracklength (that being perceived as 0 then) up to sending data to the DAC with "default speed", or IOW 44100. This by itself could cause the "slomotion" people encountered, but, which happens by the coincidence of the DAC being set to a fixed speed (if not, the speed will be controlled by XXEngine3, and you probably wouldn't notice, again depending on *other* data received wrongly, like a set Double which was read as "not double". All coincidences coincidences.

The effect on real crashes within XXEngine3 are unknown, but most likely they did not happen, although again this could be dependend on environmental settings like the example of the fixed DAC speed.

When this was solved, the log files showed another anomaly : one track could load more than once, which again was caused by careless programming, but encouraged by the priority settings, the thread dealing with the trackload (set to the lowest priority) not being able to tell in time that it was running already within the time a next check was done for whether it was allowed to start. Yep, these things happen when one problem is solved (think back of the "ticks" during trackload that could happen for some) and things are in fact too complicated to change once they are running well.
Whether this by itself created "crashes" ... maybe. It can not be overseen what is causing what when a track is loaded twice in parallel, in the mean time consuming twice the memory, or just not but then overwriting its own memory while in the mean time it already started playing. Anyway it would be a good cause for tracks abrubtedly stopping towards their end, because one of those double (or even triple, as seen) tracks would - or anyway could overwrite the playing track.

To conclude this : please report if you find ANY anomalies during playback. They should all be solved now, or they weren't reported (and noticed) in the first place.

Further changes :

• There's a TemporaryData folder now under your XX folder. It is meant to contain various temporary files which otherwise clogs up your XX folder. Over time some files types will move over to there.
• A first one are the log files mentioned. They are available to you as well, and in the Settings Area a new checkbox "Log Activities" can be ticked in order to activate logging. A few notes :
  
  
  • The log files are meant to be helpful with playback problems / anomalies. With problems they can be sent when asked for (please don't just post them, because they can be long).
  • Per "session" a log file will be created, and it consists of date and time for your conveniency.
  • XXHighEnd and XXEngine3 are different instances, and each have their "sessions". With XXHighEnd a session emerges each time it is started, and for XXEngine3 this is the same. When all is normal, for XEngine3 this happens one time per "playback session", hence per pressing Play. Note though, when things are not right, this can happen more times under the hood. In any case, watch the file times when you're explicitly reporting, and send (again, when asked for) all the files that fall in the range of your trials (and not only the last 2).
  • XXHighEnd log files start with XX, and XXEngine3 log files start with X3.
  • The Log Activities" checkbox will remember your settings over sessions, but it will not at a new version of XXHighEnd. It will be reset to Off (unticked) then.
  
  
• Somewhere in one of the latest versions an error slipped in dealing with the "Chk" checkbox (bottom of the Library Area) and it wasn't quite useable anymore. This has been solved.
  
  
• Together with the above, the "Grp" checkbox has been removed. It interfered with things, was rather useless, and it never worked as intended anyway.
  
  
• When (by accident) an individual album was asked for by means of the bottom "..." button in the Library Area (meant for music root folders) errors occurred at showing the album. This has been solved.
  
  

Btw, don't be surprised if there's a new version uploaded in no time, because the logfiles are running here constantly now, and things may come from it.

Edit : For now, do not switch on logging. It will cause anomalies by itself ! This will be solved ASAP.

Nah, without pictures I can't understand ...
Nor would I say that this is about new ATI drivers. I wouldn't know how anyway ...


That's just because you didn't copy the licence file to it. But re-entering your Activation Code just does the trick.

I think you can always make screen copies by means of the Print Screen button (or alt-printscreen or cltrl-printscreen ... I never know) and then do ctrl-v in a word document which you can attach here (that won't be the best copy, but is sufficient I think).

Why the minimizing - and back helps ... weird ...
If you talk about the "new ATI driver", just revert back to the old one. You will know soon enough ...

All what you say I recognize, except for that it wouldn't be solveable ... (and I don't know how you got it that far)

You do know about the splitter bars which are there ? just look at the first picture at the top-right of the coverart; that arrow appears when you're over the vertical splitter bar. You can drag it to the left and right, and the size of the pane changes.
The last two pictures show the splitter bar between the middle and the right pane ...

If you already knew that, you'll probably have a problem with the situation as how it is now statitically (which I don't know of, and obviously can't judge without a screenshot, but anyway, if you install XX again in another folder, that would be reset. But if it is not, again install XX in another folder, and answer "No" to the question "Load previous settings" at the first startup.

If you then still have a problem, buy a new display.

Yes of course, but (kind of obviously) I always gave it the lowest priority. It will be there soon.
But first I want the bugs out. I hope you understand ...

I sent you a (forum, My Messages) PM.

No ...

But you wouldn't be the first to "mess up" at copying files from one version to the other.
Or if you made changes to your network (hence PC name or Workgroup Name) then it can't find the necessary stuff anymore (whether you think it is needed or not ).

Anyway, when you re-activate with the Code you received before, that now doesn't work anymore ?
I can provide you a new one if needed ...

Well, to be very honest, I can't be sure whether this is needed for everyone (also see Cover art question, but I do know that

a. I just have it always like that during development;
b. with some unrelated testing the other day I found files from the drive root showing up in the CoveArt area;
c. Fidelio from the link I just gave solved his problem with it.

This stuff is kind of crazily complex because you crazies stuff the coverart in all places except where I would put it (hehe), name it like the weather tells you, and ... I didn't want to put restrictions on that all.

The main reason why this is "needed" now, is for a structure like this :

\Music\Rock\Pink Floyd\Meddle\[tracks]
\Music\Rock\Pink Floyd\Meddle\CoverArtFolder\[coverartfiles]

combined with situations like this :

\Music\Rock\Pink Floyd\The Wall\CD1[tracks]
\Music\Rock\Pink Floyd\The Wall\CD2[tracks]
\Music\Rock\Pink Floyd\The Wall\[CoverArtFiles]

The last example shows that I have to traverse up for multi volume albums.

Then think of this :

\Music\Pink Floyd - Meddle\[tracks]

and you'll see that I end up in the root at traversing up, since at that stage I don't know that Meddle is a single volume.

I only showed a few combinations/situations ... there are quite some more. But the above hopefully explains that it is already needed to have the additional level because of otherwise finding files in the drive root (and they will show up in each album then). When you don't have those files ... no problem.
What the situation of Fidelio is ... I can't tell. Of course (hehehe) here everything is allright to that aspect.

Hi Adrian,


Just after you bring up XXHighEnd again ? I just cannot imagine this combination. For esample (*if* related at all) ... if you don't select "close" for XXEngine3, you would be able to use XXHighEnd anyway. Both are not related by any means. Please allow me to say (and no offence meant !) : this cannot be true. However, you must be dealing with something here I gues ...

I will dive into this for sure ... just because I already intended. I mean, today I thought of the fact that there is some code in there that "silences" the last unfilled buffer part. It could silence the whole track maybe ...

Again, I really appreciate your help. But don't go crazy along with me ...

Johan (GerardA too), thanks all so much for your efforts to make this clear;
From my side I have been proving tonight that shutting off the swap file really harms. I had a whole sequence of screen copies showing the evolvement (Johan, having in mind your Fagen album), which indeed ended in the below screenshot. So, I left out the others because apparently this is not your case ... (and I had to kill some crucial services in order to be able to make the screenshot ).

The real error happening here is the e0434f4d. Well, if you Google for that, you'll find a far too general description everywhere, to deal with. Since I don't have anything of the kind I'm about to hang myself.

Also, I was just thinking ... *If* this indeed is a memory problem, it should be solved by ticking the Mem checkbox.

... which I forgot !

Johan,

With "Application Crash" you mean "XXEngine3 stopped working" ? or do you mean something else ?

In this case I am *rather* confident these are memory (too low) problems. Wasn't it so that with Double you need 7 times the longest track ? (count 64MB for 6 minutes, or around 250MB per 6 minutes).

Do you think this can be the problem ?
(also, we have Shut off Virtual Memory now, with which I only want to say that no matter you have 3GB of memory, you can use 2GB only. Max !).

Also, I don't know who I promised it to, but it could be you ... I want to split tracks when the memory gets low ...
many things to do.


PS: I'm at the third album by now.

No problem. But please tell me how you "managed" that ?
It might be a warning for others ...