I've been having loads of fun with MED 1.7 and my new new mixer. It's fantastic to get my MIDI gear back into action and also to be able to use it properly for the first time, sticking my DrumStation's separate outputs onto their own mixer channels and so on.

However...

I've had a few problems with MED. The first is that it tends to stutter during playback every now and then for no particular reason. Maybe I need to cut back the audio tracks to one or two (although I think I tried that), but as it is I'm only actually playing samples on two CPU channels - the rest is all MIDI.

I am using a pretty old PC, but I'd expect it to be able to handle a bit of MIDI without tripping over itself. It's running on Windows 98 with nothing else going on at all. So it's an old-ish PC, but it's a pretty clean and simple system with all the latest Win98 updates. Apart from "get a new PC" does anyone have any suggestions?

The other problem is that it's crashing for no apparent reason. MED freezes up, although the rest of the operating system keeps going.

Any clues?


I have toyed with the idea of upgrading it to Windows XP, but I'm slightly fearful that the new OS will just leech all the CPU power.

I "think" Its windows 98 causing it

Play the track back and run the mouse over the resize buttons and see if med stutters

If it is then there's some thing in 98 that needs to be turned off to prevent this
But its been a while since ive come across this

I "think" you go to display properties and turn something off in "apperance" (effects menu)

I could be wrong and if anyone else can shed some light on this please do

It may also be AV software running in the background. If however you've not got any AV software running in the background... Hmmm, I'm not going to say "get a new PC".
Stumped.
I know this has happened before on other peoples set up but I've never had this stuttering problem but that might be because I've always built fast PCs for myself.
As Darkside posted, Im sure that there was something in the set up, something to do with appearance that sorted this problem out (or helped reduce it)
Follow Darksides leads... it might work.

Blue

OK, thanks for the info. I'll have a poke around with the Windows 98 Appearance options. I've made sure I don't have anything else at all running in the background, just a straight boot into Win98 and then into MED.

I'm sure a new PC would sort it out, but as I'm prepared to run MED in a pretty basic way, CPU-wise (ie, just MIDI if it comes to it), I'd like to get to the bottom of it, as I'm not in a position to get a new computer right now (and there's no point upgrading to something cheap that I'll need to junk again in a couple of years).

I know it's a lot to ask for something to run on Windows 98 these days, so as soon as I can I'll switch to XP on that machine.

Have you checked the "stutters" in the FAQ's that came with MED Tony

Of course, you are right in thinking that a nice fast pentium 4
CPU/Win XP 'Pro' and plentyof Ram will help

Ray

Not Pro. You don't want XP Pro for music. Pro comes with loads of additional background tasks that eat CPU and has all sorts of network stuff you probably don't use (unless you need to log on to a Windows server). And when you have managed to switch all of those off, you end up with XP Home. So why buy Pro?

Hmm, you could be right, just don't like the home edition

Ray

Pro works perfect for music as long as you have plenty of ram

Also Pro supports multiple processors amongst other things wich home edition doesnt


For instance : Ive got pro running on a 2.8 athlon with 1.5 gig ram

I have both msn messenger and yahoo running at once along side zone alarm and Avg.
I can still have both soundforge and med running and not have a single problem (other than the odd glitches that are in med's sample editor but these are well known and in the process of being sorted soon from what i gather and thats why i run soundforge along side med)

Its more so down to the machine you run xp on. Never run xp on anything less than 512 megs of ram

Also If upgrading avoid Asus motherboards like the plague for music work

Not having much luck sorting this out. My music PC is only a PII with 128MB RAM. I don't think XP would even get out of bed for that sort of power, so I'm loath to install a new OS.

Thinking about it, though, I could always put XP on one hard drive and have a dual boot system. Maybe that's the best thing. I'll try that.

I can't help thinking MED 1.7 must be written in BASIC or something if it can't handle a bit of MIDI sequencing on that spec. Let's get this into some perspective: Bomb the Bass used to use a Commodore 64 for their MIDI sequencing. 64K vs. 128MB. 1MHz 6510 CPU vs Pentium II...

Regarding the crashing/freezing, I did wonder if there was some sort of MIDI feedback loop involved, but I disconnected the MIDI-In cable to the PC and it still happened.

Never mind, I'll soldier on.

I'm curious to know what "other things" Pro does that Home doesn't that are good for music?

By the way (and off topic), Windows is a strange bird when it comes to memory usage. Did you know that the old Windows 2000 Server couldn't be installed on a machine with less than 256MB (there was a check in the installer), while Windows 2000 Advanced Server (which is a lot bigger) installed and ran fine on a 128MB box!

The oldest machine I've run MED on was a Dell P3 233 MHz with 512MB and XP Pro. This ran reasonably well, but then again I only use MIDI, which is a lot easier on the CPU.

Yeh that whole win 2000 thing used to bug the hell out of me

Ive come across all kinds of weird set ups and problems in the past 20 years

The "other things" i mentioned were pretty much along the same lines as the multi processor support.. was just using that as a term of speech

Tony

A: your absolutely right xp would spit its dummy out on that set up

B: i think 1.7 will do the same

Please if anyone has any better info then correct me on this as it a long time since i used a PII

The only thing I can add for older PC's is: use 98SE. I've had an old Compaq 100 MHz P1 laptop that worked best with 98SE which was notably faster than plain 98 or even 95.

To be honest the diffrence (albeit a HUGE diffrence) is the fact that the likes of the c64 etc had the OS hardwired into the motherboard and you had the sid chip etc for sound. Everything was a set standard on the whole

Amiga was pretty much the same when it first came out, only diffrence is OS was on floppy disk

With pc's you got so many configurations and bits.. there's no set standard as such so every system works slightly diffrent

Well that's my theory anyway

Wish it was that easy Tony

It's in C++

Ray