PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hey Booster and garyb and AndreD,

thanks a lot for this tips.

If I further receive any requests in my support box, concerning this problem then I will pass your experiences on. We will see then, if it global helps. Hope so.

Thanks again.

cheers
ralf

thanks for the tip

On 2005-06-30 01:52, Booster wrote:
I had the same problems including many others and nothing would work. Tried really everything and was so fed up with the situation that I bought a new motherboard.

My new Asus P5P800S with Intel P4 is running really stable compared to my older Epox AMD 2200+, although it freezes exactly the way you describe from time to time. The whole PC is stuck and the audio is playing a short loop. And it always happens when I'm playing my keyboard.

My masterkeyboard is a Yamaha SY99 and is sending active sense information. Because of your warnings I now plugged it into my Unitor 8 instead of my Creamware midi-input (although I used the midi-filter to get rid of the active sensing), and it seems to work now. Just tested it for a couple of hours, but it seems fine.

I'll be back when the first freeze appears!

Ralf,

I can imagine that you tell people facing the same problems as we did to disconnect the Pulsar midi-input, because it works fine up untill now for me.

But what if they don't have another input? And why is active sensing causing problems on the Pulsar cards? Wouldn't it be much better to solve the problem instead? In the end I'd like to use my Pulsar inputs as well...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Booster on 2005-07-01 08:07 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Booster on 2005-07-01 08:08 ]</font>

@ Booster, active sensing is a well known problem causing feature of old synths, It's not a problem to be solved by any todays company, just turn it off if possible

True, but it should not freeze up your whole PC. And filtering it in the Scope software isn't helpfull either. If my Unitor 8 can cope with it, then why is it a problem for the Creamware cards?

my answer is a bit speculative as I have no information about SFP internals, but SFP itself has a very, very demanding 'midi infrastructure'.

All and everything has the potential of midi communication in both directions (you turn a knob on screen - it sends controller data, it receives controller data - it has to update the interface)

the (imho not very useful in current applications) active sensing message just overflows the system at very low level.

it seems to be linked to the XP media drivers at the same level and as such seems to be capable to kill some core parts of the OS.
this also seems to be closely related to P4 and XP as I never had it on PIII like systems, which were state of the art when Scope was developed.
You could as well ask M$ why their OS is that sensitive to such errors

bottom line: the midi part in SFP is probably very difficult to modify in depth. The 'weak' implementation in Modular also points in this direction and in fact new developers have their difficulties in extending it's functionality.

there's a ton of (additional) things that could be done in Modular with a better implementation

yet to refuse a $50 investment to get a troublefree system isn't a true argument against an external box - it's the price of 2 quality digital cables

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-07-01 12:21 ]</font>

active sensing WILL freeze the whole pc, regardless of what you think......

it must be disabled or filtered.

Creamware midi ports aren't the only product on the market that suffers from this. My Roland JD-800 has active sensing and Nuendo used to have constant lockups & bsod's on me. One day I noticed that a minute or so before lockup the usb icon for my MidiEx (steinberg midi hub) would disappear from my tasktray and the lights on the usb midi hub would stop working. Assuming the MidiEx was to blame, I replaced the MidiEx with a Midiman (now M-audio) Midisport and the same thing still occured. I was never able to use my JD800 on the Scope cards due to an improper midi ground on the JD800 (hum) until I upgraded my main studio mixer, and then I noticed that it occurs there also. After others on PlanetZ complained about the same thing it became obvious that the culprit is active sensing (my JD800 is the only synth I own with active sensing, and its the only one to cause problems),

Now the interesting part is that at some point I *stopped* having problems with active sensing causing lockups, but I don't have the JD800 connected to my Scope cards and I use Logic instead of Nuendo these days. The Midisport drivers date back to March 7, 2003 so I don't think anything there has changed either. I wouldn't be surprised if Scope still had lockup problems with active sensing, but since its in a 2nd PC and runs alongside my Logic DAW I don't really represent the average Creamware user anymore.

Now I don't mean to imply that it isn't something Creamware can fix, but obviously something else is at work here too. It would be interesting to know if anyone still uses Scope cards on Win98 and has an active sensing keyboard that they can test with. Perhaps its something in Microsoft's Directmusic midi stack, or at least something with NT-based OS's?

Whoops... the freezing is back.

No midi connected to the Pulsar cards, everything is hooked up to my Unitor 8 feeding Cubase SX 3 (latest update) with an active sense filter. So no active sensing is sent to Cubase or the Scope environment. If I could turn it of in my keyboard, believe me, I would have done so...

I believe it only appears when I play the STS sampler connected to a sequencer midi source. The midi-monitor is showing no active sensing and I can repeat this crash over and over with different sample-sets in the STS. Could this imply a memory failure? The system doesn't crash on playing notes to a Scope synthesizer. At least, not untill now that is...

I'll try to hook up my Synthex as a master keyboard to see if it also happens. This one only sends note-on and off information.

Going almost crazy now...

Just playing a sequence from Cubase to Scope. No midi inputs, only Cubase playing the file. When I put the mousepointer over the File menu in Cubase, the whole system freezed. All audio inputs on the Creamware cards where still working, but the complete machine is stuck.

I'm starting to run out of options here...

I remember that some AKAI samples that where, if I remember well formerly EMU but I wouldn't swear it, if loaded on any sampler, from the old sampleplayer to those of the STS series, freezed my system, sometimes with bad audio stuttering and blue screen. Removing those samples (whose origin was not the clearest...) I never had this issue again.

After some time I thought, but I can't control, that maybe a bad made or interpreted loop, maybe too short, could choke the ram, that wasn't of the fastest type....

On 2005-07-02 02:01, Booster wrote:
Going almost crazy now...

Just playing a sequence from Cubase to Scope. No midi inputs, only Cubase playing the file. When I put the mousepointer over the File menu in Cubase, the whole system freezed. All audio inputs on the Creamware cards where still working, but the complete machine is stuck.

I'm starting to run out of options here...

That is definetly something that has nothing to do with Scope. When weird things happen moving the mouse, scrolling or opening menus, I suspect of a bad configuration of the graphic card, it's drivers, irq, resources settings....or memory quality.

It is happening at random now, not only at mouse movements, not only at playing midi-notes. Random.

I have three Pulsar boards, no IRQ conflicts, the latest video-drivers (Matrox G550) so I really don't think any of these are causing troubles. Playing some audio with the Media Player over Scope isn't a problem at all. It has to be something with the combination of Cubase, midi and Scope.

It could indeed be a memory problem. And I'm afraid that's gonna cost me a lot of money. Again... Can anybody confirm on memory problems?

On 2005-07-02 03:35, Booster wrote:
It is happening at random now,
...
It could indeed be a memory problem. And I'm afraid that's gonna cost me a lot of money. ...

it could be as simple as a damaged (worn out) capacitor - I had something with similiar symptoms recently.
Fortunately problems with MSI boards and caps were mentioned on planetz, so I had a peek at the mobo in question - otherwise I probably would have thrown it away

A cap (in the middle of the board) had a bulky top, replaced it and thing is healthy again.

The capacitors in question are colord 'big' (compared to other parts) tubes standing upward on the mobo. On their metal top there's a small cross engraved in the surface.
This surface should be plane - if it's round (like it's gonna blow up) then it's almost certainly damaged.

You can easily do this inspection yourself - to replace the part is not that simple, as current mobos have up to 8 connection layers.
The caps are special types, too - a regular one from electronic supplies definetly will not work (I used one from another mobo).

cheers, Tom

Thank you guys, for all the help...

It took a while, but I got rid of the freezings!!!

What did I do? Well, after I tried really everything (changing PCI slots although I had no sharing IRQ's, tweaking PCI latencies, using 1 instead of 3 Pulsar boards, re-installing Scope and so on...) I formatted my drive, started all over again and installed XP from scratch but this time without ACPI. And that was the keyword: NO ACPI. My previous mobo had many problems but performed even worse without ACPI, so that's why I installed my new Asus mobo with ACPI enabled. And boy, was I wrong...

So anybody encountering strange freezings: try to disable ACPI and make a clean install. I now that it is a hell of a job, but I got rid of all instabilaties. Rocksolid!

I'm making music again!

ACPI...A Certain Pain In (the ass)

I find it highly interesting that ACPI acts like a broken electrolytic capacitor - isn't that a bit over the top ? you don't have to emulate all and every thing...
but congrats for getting your system going

cheers, Tom

It's really strange to see this mobo working so stable with ACPI turned off while my other mobo really had more problems with ACPI turned off then ACPI enabled.

But the most important thing: I turned my computer on yesterday morning, and for the first time in weeks, I didn't have to restart it all day. Not once! Yeehaa!!!

I'm sorry to be confusing here,
but here active sensing is on , and running fine. I never had any freezes...

Is you setup working without you keybord?
E.g. draw a controller in SX and feeding it to a scope device ?

Have you tried swapping your card to another pci slot ? (result will be a different irq..)

I'm running acpi (XP-SP2).
My card is on IRQ 4.

I guess you've reinstalled sfp4.0 a few times. Did you ever reinstall in a different location? Have you done the "attrib" on the setup files.. Cause they are all read only by default..

Well , hope you solve the problem.

cheers,

Casper


*edit* darn , I think my eyes were sleeping or something. Did't read you already fixed it..













<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: casper on 2005-07-04 04:56 ]</font>

*edit* darn , I think my eyes were sleeping or something. Did't read you already fixed it..


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: casper on 2005-07-04 04:56 ]</font>

Thanks anyway

BTW: I reconnected my SY99 with active sensing filtered in Scope. No problemos! It was purely the ACPI that had to be turned off...

Maybe even stranger: When I look in my device list now, the Creamware cards are all on IRQ 10 together with my videocard and SMBus controller. Still not one click or dropout in two full days... I don't get it, but you won't hear me complaining!

the smbus controller should cause no problems. i would be suspicious of the vid card irq, however. you may need to change slots or reserve irqs in the bios. otherwise, congratulations.