Hi,

When rebooted after checking the minimise OS button, windows promps a message (right under in the screen) that it it is running an illegal version (build 7400).

Normal Windows is of the plain vanilla variety, that is that is with SP1 uninstalled and one update that is not removable. Normally everything is legal and fine.

I hope this will not lead to some 30 day time out or something.

About the SQ: some material plays like never before, the best experience yet. I will have to work on the balance of my system to get the low end up there with the rest.

Regards, Coen

Hi all,

I'm reviving this thread because of a new learning on the HDD sound topic.

My PC-etised music collection has grown beyond my SATA drive capabilities, so I bought a new one. To leave for some growthpotential I chose a 2T 3.5" sata spinpoint. When formatting I remembered someone mentioning on this forum to choose a large cluster size for rapid access to the music data. So I did choose 64k size and transferred all my music to this partition. Everything played fine for a while, but an annoyance with the sound grew over time.
This was not a good sign.

Meawhile I installed 9z5 and played around with settings to adress the annoynce, unfortunately to no avail. When I started to blame the drive again I remembered the non standard clustersize. As an experiment I made a new standard (4K) partition and listened closely for differences in sound. A you would have guessed by now the differences were quite audible in the sense that they both leave a different impression of the music (sometimes I had to make shure I was playing the same track, could have been late night fatigue ). Fortunately with the 4k clustersize my annoyance was gone and I'm again enjoying the music.

Does anybody have similar or contradictory experiences? Maybe this is just a thing of my setup...

regards, Coen   

Hi,

I would like to report some quirks I found.

- the xx stuck on taskbar issue is not completely solved. XX still sticks to the taskbar sometimes, but it is easier solved than with 09-z4. You only have to restart XX and kill the existing xx.

- sometimes after playing music for a while I hear a loud 'PLOP' when a new track starts and the sound disappears (silence). When I stop the track there is a 'PLOP' again. The track plays fine on the second run.

- The volume control does not allways work. When this happens XX won't stop and several error messages pop-up. I have to kill XX and engine3 to start playing again.

- In unattended XX is very slow with reacting on hot-keys. For serveral other reasons (special mode very critical and strait C not liking to go to the next track)  I predominantly use XX in attended mode.

regards, Coen

This looks like the exact the same problem as I posted in the 'xx stuck on taskbar' thread.

Or am I mistaken...?

You're welcome!

Its of course also in my own interest to have a flawless XX!

Deleting the configfile fixes the sitiuation, though I do not know for how long.

Yesterday I 'installed' XX on the C:\ (root) partition (it resided on the music partition) with two results:
- XX working again, but not long after it was stuck again on the taskbar,
- I could swear SQ was better (If this is really true, I will comment on this later on in the HDD sound thread)

This bug does have a relation with the exporer-coming-up-instead-of-xx bug. Before being stuck on the taskbar, XX doubles as an explorer window or it struggles, flashing a few times before coming up. When started (alt-p) it does not completely wipe the screen, but leaves the windowsicons in unattended mode.
Also, this may not be related at all, I have the habit of closing an open explorer window during the boot of XX. This could ie be the window XX is started from.

Like Suteetat i usually start from the shortcut (or autostart).

One more thing I noticed is that, when stuck on the taskbar, something 'flies' from the Phasure icon to the lower left of the monitorscreen when the icon is clicked. With a new click it 'flies' back. It lookes like text but it vanishes to quickly.

regards, Coen

Shure! I was only surprised that it all worked so well for good old XP, even on SATA. At this moment, Win 7 optimised has the edge though (on my IDE disc).

There is still a lot of work to do!

regards, Coen

XX won't come up. Tiling, cascading, nothing works.

Rightclicking the Phasure icon on the taskbar (taakbalk) give me three options: XX shortcut, pin to taskbar, close XX.

Doubleclicking the XX application or shortcut or alt-x results into an icon in the taskbar. The only thing that works (even with hotkeys) is closing it again.

Is there any way to restore XX or its framework?

Before XX being stuck on the taskbar I experiencenced that SC came up with the reboot message. Mixed mode worked, no problem.

regards, Coen

Hi all,

The boottime has shown to be important in this issue. I found that the boottime of the SATA drive was consistently considerably larger than that of the IDE (1:20 vs 0:48). cpu load was consistently higher too.

Also the mobo apparently has two kinds of SATA II controllers: two ports on the NM10 chipset and two ports on the PCI-e IDE/SATA-II controller. It turned out that both drives where plugged into the PCI-e controller ports. Replugging made for some difference but not in boot times.

The latter changed when I put the SATA drive in AHCI mode. Boottime was now 0:46, faster that the IDE. SQ suffered however. Reconfiguring the drive for IDE mode kept the fast boottime with much better SQ. Also cpu load is comparable to the IDE situation.
Something probably did not go well at the install of the memory drivers in win7.

There still is a SQ difference between the drives though. The SATA drive sound seems to be in desperate need of seasoning, all stays a little too dull and polite.

Since my win7 install won't launch XX from the taskbar anymore (see new topic in support threads), I've been playing with XP again. After some tweaks SQ is hard to fault and out of the box much better than Win7 SP1.
It occurred to me that a lot of recommended OS tweaks apply to XP, but not to win7. The latter only sounds good in exactly the setup of my signature.

Furthermore XP does NOT sound good unattended no matter what configuration. Can we have the stop-services back for attended mode?

regards, Coen

Hi,

Cannot play in Win 7 anymore. When XX launches it settles in the taskbar but cannot be started anymore. Not even in 'explorer window' mode :-). On-off hotkeys work, but XX does not start play for alt-p.

Even after several reboots this problem is still not solved.

I did nothing spectacular between the working and not working situation. I only ticked setup for 'maximum performance' in the advanced system/performance tools. Now it is reticked to the original 'optimum'.

Another thing is that, the day before, out of the blue XX would not play SC anymore. Not even after a fresh reboot.

How do I get this working again?

regards, Coen

Please note that the SSD thing for 09-z-4-1 was discussed in another thread. I do have no personal experience with a SSD drive for the OS. Booting is no issue, skipping the bootselector quickly I can stay in the ballpark of one minute, including the start of XX (autostart).

I can however confirm that the disc the OS resides on makes an audible and for me relevant difference in SQ.
Today I cross-connected the discs: OS on IDE, music on SATA and OS on SATA, music on IDE. Maybe I exaggerate when I say the OS on SATA, music on IDE sounded like total cr@p, but for shure I didn't like it. The reverse config however played its charms on music albeit sounding a tad 'strange'.

Fortunaltely XX still has the 'copy to XX disc first' button. But that's  for the next round of experiments :-)!

regards, Coen

Yep

We dont know if there is more/stronger EC going on with retreiving the data on fast High capacity SATA drives. For shure I expected the reverse to be true. Since most of the XX SQ is related to jitter I figured the a lower power consumption of the 2.5"SATA would yield into a less jitter inducing PSU pattern.
There is a 6 Watt difference at idle and a 10 Watt difference at load between the two (the 3.5 IDE being the least 'Al Gore'). That alone should be accountable for some difference.

So what is it then? PSU loading? NorthBridge loading/optimalisation (mobo was working in IDE mode)?

I will conduct some more experiments to verify/exclude some of the above.

Another possibility is that the signature of the IDE fits my system and taste better. Let's stay at the observation that there is a difference between the two!

regards, Coen

Hi,

As we all know the SSD lost its favour since 9z4-1, consequently I've been buying a low power 2.5"spinning (5k2) SATA II disc for my new system for OS and music files.

At first I installed W7 SP1 on my 'old' 160G IDE drive and found a wonderfull sound with Specialmode & Scheme 3 & Straight Cont. & unattendeded.
This sound is however lost when I run XX from the newly installed OS(es) on my new SATA drive. To be shure that the other drive doesn't play a role I disconnected it completely before booting (no BIOS tweaks either).

I've made an effort to be shure that exactly the same configurations are on both HDDs. Even then, the SATA's SQ just won't cut it. It's just to weak, very natural though, but no sparkle of life. It seems that there is more power in the instruments and voices when on the IDE drive. Also the (valued by me) musical flow is just better on the IDE config.

There is still a lot to explore (PSU, BIOS tweaks), but be aware that the type of HDD makes a difference in SQ.

Anybody else ran into this?

regards, Coen

Just got XP-pro SP3 working MC in special mode with the same Ntrights trick. Never was able to do that on my old config!
That is Peter only allows for mixed contiguous since XP can't deal with SC.

BTW: the PC is now dual boot with win7 HP SP1. Had to apply the same thing again on the new install to get SC and MC working...

Now the real tweaking can begin!

regards, Coen

I seem to run into a lot of strange stuff!

It does get weirder.

I noticed today that the sq was nowhere it was yesterday. Late Night syndrome?
Nope. The difference between yesterday and today is that I had the task manager running whilst playing (to see if my hotkeys work). Brought up taskmanager started xx (unattended) and bingo there it was again: excellent sound.

Another thing, maybe related (?).

In the bios I noticed the HPET timer. wiki says:


and:

Maybe some of the differences between XP and Vista/Win7 can be explained as well as the taskmanager having an influence on the interruptpatterns.

regards, Coen
regards, Coen