I just discovered:
"Anne Dudley plays The Art of Noise"

In my opinion a necessary addition to any collection of "Art of Noise" afficionados:)

Peter,

Yesterday, I had a small brainfart, I turned off my music PC while the audio PC was playing music.

Which shouldn't really be a problem I guess, but it is...

I lost RDP (obviously) so I turned off the audio PC (after the music had stopped playing) by pulling the plug. I didn't know how else.

The result is that I now always get:
24 bit Second Stage Crack Detect!-> 51
Playback has been stopped.

So I have no sound at all, even when I disable crack detect, It seems to play, but I still have no sound.

Any idea what I can do about this?

Peter,

If I clear the Playlist Area, and exit XXhighend, I can restart it again, steps 1 through 5 give me no problems.

Step 5: restart Y:\XXHighEnd\XXHighend.exe (from Ramdisk) This works fine
Step 6: Press the L (library) button. XXhighend is "not responding"

And that is about it.

If I now kill xxhighend, re-attach the drive and restart XXhighend, everything is fine.

Peter,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Before I start doing what you suggest:

You seem to be shure that it is windows that is causing the problems.

I have an ISO for win10 14393.0
I could just run setup, but I'm not exactly shure what happens then....

Does it re-install windows from scratch and do I have to configure everything from fresh?
Or does it (try to) repair windows and everything is what I (hopefully) want it to be?

Do you happen to know which of the two will happen?

All in MaxOS, of  course!

Henk

Peter,

This one's quite easy for me:
If I disconnect the USB drive (A\:music) from the music PC, and then start up XXhighend, my RDP of the audio PC looks like this:

https://ibb.co/dhwrWH

- I have started the Task Manager.
- My mouse hovers over the XXhighend Icon in the Taskbar.

XXhighend  does start, but never opens a window, and all I can do is kill it in the Task Manager.

If I re-connect the music drive TO THE SAME USB PORT and restart XXhighend, everything seems to be fine. But if I do not know which port this was and I use another one I am in deep trouble, because the Audio PC will never find it, unless it is in MaxOS, which it isn't...

PS: I'm using the Y: and Z: disks as ramdisks, because A: and B: were already in use when I started to use ramdisks. Just to check, I did once revert back to using A: and B:, as your ramdisk example does, and this does not have any influence on the behaviour demonstrated above....

Hi Peter,

I've been thinking about this for a few days...

Somewhere in xxhighend you use some code to change the state of the OS from MaxOS to MinOS (or the other way around).

If you would isolate that code and make it a small separate program, I could use it to get the PC in MaxOS, find and fix the problem myself, and put the PC back into MinOS before restarting XXhighend.

Would you be willing to do that?

Gr,

Henk

Hi Peter,

I'm afraid USB2 is not going to make a difference...

If the music disk does not exist I find that if I rightclick the xxhighend icon in the taskbar, that windows tells me that XXhighend is not responding. Which I think means that it "hangs", right? I never get to see the XXhighend window, just the icon....

Yesterday, I reorganised the music PC: I removed all connections, (monitor and USB) re-located the pc in a different location and reconnected everything.

I must have connected my music disk into a different usb port than before, so that the audio PC can't find it, because it is in MINOS (I know, this was not so smart, I should have rebooted the audio PC in MAXOS before I started mucking around with the music PC).

The result:
- XXhighend "hangs" (not responding)
which means I can not get the audio PC out of MINOS
which means I can not unmount the music disk from the audio PC
which means I have a big problem.....

It took me several hours before I found a solution:
I killed XXhighend using the task manager.
I deleted all files that I could find in XXdata that were less than 3 days old.
I restarted XXhighend, immediately set MAXOS and rebooted.

I have no idea why this worked, but it did solve my problems. I could unmount the non-existing disk, remount it, and now everything seems to work just fine.

I would like it very much if I didn't have to worry about this everytime I changed something in either pc though.

Peter,

I have a minor problem with my music PC: every now and then I lose the "connection" to my music disc (the "A" disc (USB) connected to my music PC)

I have no idea what is causing this, but I've learned to live with it, I only need to reboot the music pc and everything is fine.

Except for one thing: If XXhighend is running on the audio PC it "hangs" because A:\music does not exist.

How difficult would it be to slightly modify xxhighend, so that it does not "hang", but instead shows me a pop-up which tells me A:\music does not exist?

It would save me quite a bit of frustration every time this happens....

 

While browsing the net, I stumbled onto this link:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_home_no_bloatware_edition_64_bit.html

I wonder if this could be a good starting point for peter to build an even better sounding OS??

I never knew this kind of windows was available:)

I downloaded 14393 from here a few weeks ago. works like a charm , installed over my old win10 10586, which previously replaced a win7 ultimate activated version...

http://windowsiso.net/windows-10-iso/windows-10-anniversary-update-1607-download-build-14393-0/

Hi Peter,

I'm afraid this is a Babylonian speak distraction, to say it in dutch:)

I may have mentioned starting explorer in unattended, which isn't very difficult to do, in unattended.

But it has nothing to do with me noticing the "activate windows" message in unattended.

Neither is a problem, it just surprised me to see the "activate windows" message, and I was wondering if you had noticed the same....

By the way: If you want an explorer window in unattended:
- open task manager before you play any music (CTRL-Shift-Esc)
- Start the music
- In Task Manager: File -> Run New Task -> explorer
explore away, It's that simple:)

Gr,

Henk

Edit:

I just realised why peter mentioned me killling Explorer to get rid of this "activate windows" message in unattended.

I never do this. I only kill explorer from the task manager (in MINos) to get rid of this message AFTER I am done with listening to music.

I use Jriver to view movies on the same PC, and the "activate windows" message is a bit annoying when I watch a movie, that's all:)

Nope.
UNattended...

Peter, This was exactly the answer I was looking for. I had expected something like this.

So all I need to do is start my command file from the desktop after boot, and I am fine.

It would be nice though if I could just boot the machine and start playing...

Peter,

After I "upgraded" from Win10 10586 to Win10 14393, I've noticed one small change that I did not expect:

The "Activate Windows" message is (sometimes) still visible during Unattended Play.

It's probably nothing to worry about, and I know I can get rid of it myself by killing Explorer in the Task Manager, but still.

Are you aware of this change in behaviour between 10586 and 14393?

Is it possible that this change is caused by my starting to use Imdisk?

Henk

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the quick response. It's not exactly what I had hoped for though....

Of course I have read your Ramdisk topic, otherwise I would never have gotten it going.

And of course I used your rama.bat, it says so in my original post in this topic.
And if you compare your rama.bat with my command file, you will see that they are very similar.

The reason I am not using A:\ and B:\ is quite simple. Both these drive letters are used on my music PC, and shared on the network with the same drive letter on the audio PC.

Is the drive letter significant? If needed I can change them, but I never saw the point.

My only concern is:
- Use of Ramdisk, as you describe it works well, both in MAXos and in MINos.

However:
If I reboot in MINos, my own .cmd file does not work as intended. It either never even starts copying files to the E:\ drive, or it does it way too late.

Yesterday I rebooted the pc in MINos.
After 3 minutes I got fed-up, used your procedure to start up two RAMdisks manually, and started XXhighend in RAM, and had Music.

15 minutes later, a command window pops up, which shows files being copied to the E:\ disk and it too starts up XXhighend in RAM. This all happens while I'm playing music in MINos, with the Ram XXHighend that I had started manually.

So now I have XXHighend running twice, which obviously causes problems. I can not remember when exactly I got the error message in which I am asked if I want to keep running both or not, but of course that message also appears.

The only answer I am looking for is:
Why does it take 20 minutes for my command file to run, it is called in the same startup folder as your XXHighend Control Panel, so I expect it to run immediately after boot?

Could this be caused by a difference between MAXos and MINos which prevents all links in the startup folder to be executed?

Regards,

Henk