SCS 11 and old laptop with XP

[Bench Theatre]

I have recently done Diary of Anne Frank and instead of premixing the cue sequences did this within SCS - which was brilliant and everything was correctly balanced on site.

There was an issue with freezing, which I suspect may be due to the age - and hence speed - of the laptop, an Acer 1360 with 1.2 Gb of RAM running XP SP3. Screen updates for example are slow and you can see this ripple through the display as each cue is completed. In a fairly random way the laptop got so busy doing this (I suspect) that it got sidetracked from playing the cues. Thus total silence for a couple of seconds, then continues, which with a bomb falling and in midflight was a bit obvious. On a previous show I had a similar problem where the next hot key cue would only run after the previous one was complete, but this was solved by going into Performance mode; this did not work for Anne Frank. On the DirectSound screen the only check boxes marked are defaults with BASS mixer off.

The problem also only came up once on stage with two audio devices defined (sound card and USB), whereas in rehearsal it had been one (sound card).

The second was more bizarre and happened at the same point a couple of times, and when the cue sequence was very simple. Started a cue, and then SCS suddenly (but not always) reloaded the previous 3 cues as the next ones in the stack, which I did not spot first time it happened.......... I have checked the cue in the editor and there is nothing there which is out of the ordinary.

Thus a) am I pushing SCS too hard within the limitations of the laptop and/or should I whack in some more memory and b) can I download a version 10 as well as version 11 because in a previous existence I never had this problem?

[Mike Daniell]

1.2Gb RAM should be fine for XP and SCS 11, so could you email me a diagnostic dump file? You can create this by clicking on Help / Create Diagnostic Dump File. The file will be saved in a folder named "SCS Dumps" under "Documents" or "My Documents".

Regarding SCS 10, yes you can run both SCS 10 and SCS 11 on the same machine. You can download SCS 10 from the Download Archive. Note that you will need to logon with your SCS User Name and Members' Area password to access this page.

[Mike Daniell]

I suspect the problem is the use of two separate sound interfaces - your dump file shows you are using "Vinyl AC'97 Audio (WAVE)" outputs L&R for "OnStage", and "SB X-Fi Surround 5.1" outputs L&R for "FOH". The audio driver is DirectSound.

Can you use the SB card for both "OnStage" and "FOH"? I think that will help. Ideally I'd recommend using ASIO but I don't know if your SB card supports ASIO. What I do NOT recommend is ASIO4ALL as this is just a wrapper around DirectSound and appears to add some processing overheads.