Straight Contiguous Questions

[boleary]

Last night after reducing the size of my Ramdisc to 1 gig I got Straight Contiguous (SC) to work with the lowest split file size , .2mb. After 30 seconds or so I stopped it (mistake, I know) and tried to increase the SFS but couldn't get any other SFS to work. I rebooted and tried again with a .2 SFS but no luck. I then reduced the size of the Ramdisc again to 750 mb, rebooted and tried again but still no luck. I have 4 gigs of ram and am using Windows7 sp 1, 32 bit. I have the 64 bit version of 7 but with only 4 gigs of ram am not sure if switching to the 64 bit version will make a difference. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

[PeterSt]

Well, maybe indeed it is so that the 32 bits OS has a more hard time to do it. The only thing I can say is that with my Vista/32 I have sort of the same experience as you have. But it is quite incompareable, because I have 8GB in the PC, and the 32 bits OS will see only 3GB of that. That's 5GB of difference, and that superimposed to what's needed in the first place by the OS (think 700-800MB or so).

Instead of spending time on getting another OS once again, it would be my advice to get Straight Contiguous running. Only one time is enough, but have sufficiently in the Playlist Area to last for a while (yes I know, the smaller the RAMDisk, the less .. etc. etc.). Notice : prepare this all before a reboot, and not after it.
You will succeed I'm sure, maybe even with an SFS of 40 (I can do that too). Now listen. Never forget your wine.

Done for as long as it lasted ? then hop over to Mixed Contigous, but make the SFS maybe 10 now. Now listen again.

Try to think you will not hear a difference. At least from my theories it shouldn't matter much. Is that indeed the case ?
You're set.
But if not, well, then maybe it's time for some effort on the 64bit OS. Only then.

A small disclaimer would be that I myself am fairly unexperienced on this all, which just is because I don't switch each our or even each day. As known, I'll take 5 days at least, unless things are unbearable.

Peter

[boleary]

Thanks Peter. Will give it a go this evening.

[boleary]

Got about a one minute taste of Straight Contiguous when a "Too many buffer errors" occurred. Again this was with a .2 SFS setting. Rebooted repeatedly trying various SFS settings, including .2 but no luck. Before trying other settings I immediately played the same track with mixed contiguous. The latter seemed thinner than Straight Contiguous but I can't say for sure cause it wasn't a long enough sample; I used SFS of 10 and 40. Will try switching from wine to beer....

Will probably try 64 bit tomorrow during the NFL playoffs; I grew up in Pittsburgh..... of course only worth saying if any of you guys across the pond follow American football.

[PeterSt]

But are you sure all your settings are equal to when those Buffer Errors don't occur ? I mean, I don't see the relation ...
unless ...
Unless an SFS of 0.2 is too small and other things go wrong. But this is not my experience.

BUT FYI :

An SFS of 0.2 vs. something like 1.5 will NOT matter at obtaining the memory. That is, it won't with Straight Contiguous. So, better try 1.5 !!
To be 100% on the safe side that this doesn't matter, better try 0.7. This is related to the size of the memory blocks, and at this moment I can't say how large they will be on your system. Could be something to output in the Log File ...


American Football ? nah, chance will be near zero here. This is similar as en Englishman talking about Cricket. Do *you* get that ?
haha

[boleary]

Cricket, isn't that an insect? 

Will play with settings, am currently listening to special mode and, for the first time, it sounds pretty good here. Its been 7 or 8 months since I last tried it.

[Suteetat]

For straight contiguous mode, I think lots of RAM definitely make it much easier.
Initially, with 12 GB RAM, 7 of them was used for RAMdisk, I also ran into the same problem
and to run things smoothly, SFS 10 is about all I can use.
Now I reduced RAMdisk to 3.5 GB and even SFS 100 seems to be running smoothly so far.

[Flecko]

For straight contiguous mode, I think lots of RAM definitely make it much easier.
Initially, with 12 GB RAM, 7 of them was used for RAMdisk, I also ran into the same problem
and to run things smoothly, SFS 10 is about all I can use.
Now I reduced RAMdisk to 3.5 GB and even SFS 100 seems to be running smoothly so far.

But it seems not the only reason. I just have 2gb of ram and have ramdisk of 512mb. So I just have 512mb of free ram if you substract the amount that windows consumes. And I can use sfs 10 after reboot.

[Suteetat]

For straight contiguous mode, I think lots of RAM definitely make it much easier.
Initially, with 12 GB RAM, 7 of them was used for RAMdisk, I also ran into the same problem
and to run things smoothly, SFS 10 is about all I can use.
Now I reduced RAMdisk to 3.5 GB and even SFS 100 seems to be running smoothly so far.

But it seems not the only reason. I just have 2gb of ram and have ramdisk of 512mb. So I just have 512mb of free ram if you substract the amount that windows consumes. And I can use sfs 10 after reboot.

Is it running SFS 10 with good stabilty or how often do you have to reboot?
With my initial setup (7GB Ramdisk), with SFS 60, I could run XXHighend pretty smoothly but get error message once in awhile and
seems that only at SFS 10 I could run it without a hitch.

When I reduced Ramdisk to 3.5 GB, at SFS 100, I have not had the problem yet including running XXHighend straight overnight (I was burning in some
new cables). Nothing else changes beside size of Ramdisk so I assume that more RAMs also seems to help.

[Flecko]

I think you are right. I have to reboot quite often. I can listen to a playlist of about one album and then the "connot find track" error appears. But this is because of my tiny ramdisk. If I have worked a little with the pc, for example start z3 to compare, then I cannont start z4 in SC mode again. But at least it works with very little ram for a short time.

[henri21961]

I got it playing now and for now stable, xx Z4, 64b win 7 sp1, ssd kingstone , 26 processen runing, no ram mem. any more , for the rest peters setup for  z4 , 
I started with the ram setup, but i had the problem , when i shift to the next number, i had the messaged sf lower , ore reboot , sound good but after every new music file ore next number shift a new reboot.a lower sf didnt worked  the problems stayed
so i I did put  the z4 on the ssd and the problems where gone,  im playing with special mode and straightcontiguous. and yes it sound beter than the z3 version overal clearder and more micro information, a bit harder colder, but for now i going test your new program, I have now only i little problem when i play unat. the hot key is not working , i gone try for a better install for the hotkey.

peter thank for the new music a discover every time when you bring out a new program.

[PeterSt]

Hi Henri - thank you for the feedback.

I assume you had AutoHotkey running before ? in that case, just check the properties of your shortcut to it, and check the paths in there. You will see soon enough that something is pointing to some old path etc.

I hope you can get it running again.
Peter