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My mate has a p4 3000mhz outta pc world.
He has a Soundblaster Live(1024),
He is running Sonar 4.0.4, and SX3.x
When recording midi with a Roland electronic kit, he gets to around 4-5 mins and his pc will crash giving an error message, exception has occurred, programe will close,
In Sonar, everything is lost, but in SX, the data up to the crash point is retrievable.

Any ideas what to check for?
All suggestions and advice gratefully accepted...

[spellchecker]

if he's not recording stuff, does his PC still crash after 4-5 minutes?

has he tried switching off firewalls/internet/anti-virus and other unnecessary background programs?

could it be something to do with a scheduler that is trying to perform a virus scan or search indexing or something that is causing heavy disk activity, which together with the recording disk activity, is causing windows to crash?

what peripherals does he have attached to the computer, e.g. webcams, printers, scanners, broadband modems, ipod docks, etc. etc.

is itunes running in the background?

Thanks Paul,
To be more specific, the crash only occurrs when recording midi,
the pc is optimised for music making(as much as xp is optimisable) with all services switched off, no itunes or infact any internet stuff,

what peripherals does he have attached to the computer, e.g. webcams, printers, scanners, broadband modems, ipod docks, etc. etc.

None,

Erm, it seems to depend on the amount of midi events buffered, ie; when a lot of drum rolls are played, then the crash occurrs earlier(4mins), than if he just plays straight beats(6mins).
It's okay when recording non midi(line ins).

[Stripey]

how much ram is in the machine?

I think he has 512 mb Stripey,

[spellchecker]

what is the midi interface? is he using ASIO drivers for the live card?

is it xp home or professional? up to service pack 2?

I think he uses the asio that is in SX, hmm, but maybe he is using the MME ??? He tried kx drivers, but it killed all audio....
As far as I know he uses an edirol usb midi, and as well as a straight to joystick midi,
Its pre installed XP sp2 home version.

[Spoonie]

i don't have a great deal of MIDI recording experience, but i think his computer maybe has AIDS.

/x

Oh t'fuck!!!

[Keilan 303]

The only things I could suggest would be trying another audio card, one that ships with ASIO support....and if the software didn't come off the shelf (ahem) try a better copy Are the soundcard drivers totally up to date? I take it the power options are set to always on (ie. nothing powers down after a moment of inactivity) screensaver disabled, hibernation disabled etc. If he's followed that webpage that gives a load of tips for tweaking your machine...one I'd argue with is the setting of Performance to background services. While this is supposed to help the drivers, it cripples general performance, and everything feels sluggish to me. If this has been selected, try switching back to performance priority. The complete list of audio tweaks can be found here http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php


If you've got a better sound card, whack it in, get the soundblaster out and see how that fares..if you can't get another card, have you tried the ASIO4ALL drivers? These have worked really well for me on really crap machines http://www.asio4all.com

I've never experienced this sort of problem (not with MIDI anyway)....my pro tools dies a lot with DAE errors when I'm doing MIDI, but thats cos my system is seriously underspec'd...way less than your mates PC, and I run SX3 fine enough recording drums via my keyboard. My sound card and Keyboard are both USB, which isn't an ideal setup, and it copes if I set a fair latency setting (12ms).....

Dunno if thats any help? I hate PC's!!!!