Playlist mysteriously stops (pauses?) (fix in 10.4.1)

[wired4sound]

Guys (and gals),

Last night during preshow, intermission, and post-show music, I had an odd thing show up with SCS 10.3.2. I have playlist cues set up for each of these three events. The playlists are all populated with mp3 song files, and all three playlists are set to play manually (GO button), and in each one, both the RANDOM and CONTINUOUS options are checked.

What happens, and is repeatable with certain songs is this: as the song ends, playback simply pauses with 0:03 seconds remaining on the song. The program should finish playing the song and go to the next one, but it just sits there. The machine is not locked at this point; I am able to click the (>) button on the "frozen" cue and this will start the next song, and the show goes on normally with no other hiccups.

I was able to find a workaround: The playlist cues were originally set up with no transitions between individual songs. I made a 1-second crossfade and clicked the button to "Apply this Transition to all Files". Voila - No more unplanned pauses.

Regards,

[Mike Daniell]

I've been trying to reproduce this and have just had a continuous, random, mp3 playlist without transitions running for over an hour without fail. I've emailed you for further info.

[dan_sheehan_wfl]

I have a similar but not identical problem.
Running SCS 10.2.0
(did not get update notices,      maybe Comcast.net snafu,   
I will update to 10.3.2 today)
Dell PC running MS VistaM-Audio FW 410
Occasionally it hangs up with SCS still running (cursor advancing)
 but M-Audio not receiving (input is frozen at some non-zero level (input lights on), no sound out

I can loop a playlist for hours [days] and not have it happen,
but it's happened often enough so I know there's something there.
Thought it might have been the one work music playlist I listen to a lot,
but it happened last night during a rehearsal for a show, totally new work.

Anybody seen anything like this ?

Alternate non-Comcast email:

srwpat@yahoo.com

Thanks

Dan Sheehan

[Dan]

Yes, I've had it happen to me twice in the last week (in the same playlist). But I haven't been able to pinpoint a specific set of circumstances that's causing it. I'm using a fixed set of songs in the playlist (not random). But, on the two times the playlist has stopped, it has been on different songs, so it is not consistently failing in the same place. And, it does not seem to be related to the cue start type, as it happened once when I was running the playlist as a time-based start, and another time as a manual start cue.

As other posters have mentioned, the playlist doesn't crash, it just stops for no apparent reason. In my case, it does cause me a bit of a problem, because when I clicked the play button for the next song in the playlist, it actually skipped that song and went directly to the next one. I'm running a radio show simulation with on-air dialogue between the songs, and when I clicked play for the next song (the one that was "stuck") it skipped it and went right to the next cue in the playlist, which was the DJ talking about how much he liked the song that was just skipped.

Since I'm in tech, I haven't had the opportunity to really hammer on the system to see if I can recreate a set of circumstances to cause it to fail consistently. But, maybe these clues will help.

[Mike Daniell]

Managed to reproduce the problem at last! Fix ready for the next release. The problem is due to the duration of an audio file sometimes being calculated 1 millisecond greater than the correct duration, so the file's playback position never reaches the end point. In my testing I only encountered this on one file, but the playlist consistently stopped because of that file.

[Dan]

Mike, I'm still having this problem in 10.4.0 under WinXP. My playlist has been consistently stopping at the same place. In fact, I experienced another problem when I installed 10.4.0, using my workaround for 10.3.0. In this new problem, the previously playing cue continued to spin (without every completing) even though it released the subsequent cue in the playlist.

I'm closing my show tonight, so next week I'll try to get together a set of repeatable conditions to send to you to investigate.

[Mike Daniell]

Let me know when you're ready, Dan, and I'll send you a tracing version which should help me identify what's causing this.

[jmgordon]

I have now encountered this problem in a playlist too, but it's not so mysterious. I have created a pre-show playlist of six tracks, but each is a file fragment, i.e. with a start and end time. When the first track reaches the end time the sound and the progress slider stop but the status panel still shows "Running" and the next cue won't start. As indicated above, even if one allows enough time for SCS to get notionally to the end of the track, the status doesn't change. Hitting "Stop" on the cue panel brings up the next track immediately.
If I remove the end times, the cue list works as intended, but the tracks are longer than I want.
If you could find a workaround by Thursday night (UK time) it would be great, as I would like to use it on Friday morning (no pressure!).
Thanks.
Malcolm

[Boswell]

I've had various problems with playlist timing/freezing ect when using MP3s, I think it is down to SCS not being able to accurately determine the length of an MP3 file especially if it is variable bit rate (VB0).
Changing ALL files to wav cured the problems.
I have no trouble now with playlists and they seem to play reliably night after night (Unattended)
Hope this helps

[Dan]

My playlist, too, consists of all MP3 files. And I can concur that the situation I encountered with the non-ending playlist cue was one where I had shortened the file length (MP3 file). Sounds like that's a good place to look.

Mike, I'm ready for the trace program now if you still need me to run it.

[jmgordon]

My list is a mixture of WAVs and MP3s (or m4as) admittedly, but the first track, which misbehaves, is a WAV. However, I have also noticed that SCS doesn't seem to be computing the total list time correctly.

Malcolm

[Dan]

I too have noticed the playlist total time inaccuracy reported by Malcom.

[Theatre III Sound]

Since this topic was posted, I have been running V10.4.0 with a random playlist of MP3 files for hours at a time. It never stopped on me, but a following SFR cue sometimes fails to completely perform the fade out and stop action I've programmed it to do. The SFR cue shows a status of completed, but the playlist is still in the ready state.