Random crashes, newbie question

Hey there, hi there, ho there!

I am pretty new to using trackers, and I have heard nothing but awesome things about Psycle, so I decided to try it out. Btw, Win 7 64-bit

I had a few problems:

1- I started out with the tutorial, and using the M3 machine, but once I attached it and played a few notes, i got an unexpected error with the microsoft api or something... and it "auto-muted" itself to keep from crashing the host. After this happened a few times, I chose a different machine in the dropdown list called "generator", and that seemed to make it happy.

2- I was happily making noises in pattern mode and added a drum track. While playing it back in pattern mode, it got stuck when it froze. The program froze and then the same (rather loud) drum noise kept playing over and over really fast. I closed the program via taskmanager, but the damn sound kept looping! I had to restart my computer.
It happened again and again, but sometimes the sound would stop when I managed to kill the process.

I'm using the default configuration, but maybe that's the problem? Not sure how to fix it... but I really want to use Psycle

Please help if you've got any ideas!!!

Sounds like an audio driver issue... If you killed the program but it was still producing sound that means that something at a lower level (an OS component) was failing. You could try to change the audio driver mode in settings->Input/Output->Sound Driver and make sure that you have sane settings there. Could also try limiting the audio threads and see if that helps but I haven't heard any reports of the multi-threading being unstable. (there is always the possibility of multi-threading causing bugs due to strange overlooked race conditions though)

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the shadow runs form the light, but can never be fully driven back.

Thanks for the super fast reply.

I have Realtek sound and ATI HDMI... did a bit of searching and it looks like a lot of people have trouble with it affecting Windows.

I just remembered issues I had a ways back with Skype, too, so it's probably the sound card....

Any thoughts on what to do with that information? I tried rolling back the ATI drivers, and am still getting the crashes, but not as often haha!

I'm getting super compulsive about hitting save

I would suggest changing the output method. If it is directX use wasapi for example. That seems the most likely thing you can try. Also, see if there are updated drivers for your onboard realtek audio chip, people often ignore those.

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the shadow runs form the light, but can never be fully driven back.

breegeek:

Hello and welcome to Psycle and psycledelics.


The M3 machine is sometimes unstable, so seeing the message about the api error and machine being muted is not strange (but should not happen too frequently).


The other problem you mention, especially when the audio keeps playing is a bit strange.

Since you use Windows 7, I suggest you to use the Wasapi driver, like shadowbane suggested.
You can get better lantency and usually is less problematic.

About the multithreaded option that shadowbane talks about, it is located also in the input/output tab. You could indicate 1 instead of 0. The downside is that will not use the cpu to its full potential, but if might help on stability.

You might want to load the different example and tutorial songs, play them and see if the program keeps stable.
(Demo songs are by default installed at: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Psycle Songs )

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<[JAZ]> Pa pi pa pa pa pi pa.... ;·D

Can confirm - disabling multithreading fixed some constant crashing issues I suddenly started having this morning.

Would it be wise to have this option set to 1 by default, just to help with stability, especially for new users?