When Recording Audition Freezes in XP

[texasfm3]

Hello All,

I have searched and found no answer... YET. I am hoping that I can get some insight or at least something to try and look at.

I have a recording machine that I built from scratch. I use this machine for recording and it has Windows XP, Adobe Audition Version 1.5 and Isotope Ozone installed. These items are the only thing really installed except for the drivers of the Phonic Helix Firewire Mixer. It has run pretty solid for the last couple years with no lockups or anything to that affect.

The computer has recently started having problems where we are recording and about 1 minute into the session Audition will lock up or the session will continue to record and it looks good, but trying to stop the recording by hitting the space bar does not happen. Then hitting the stop button with the mouse locks Audition. Either way the session is lost and we have to kill Audition. It does try to restore the session and doing so does restore a bit of the session, but the session is incomplete.

I thought ram memory but I tested out the memory using MEM86+ and it found no problems.

I am at a end and am almost to a point of simply reformatting and reinstalling everything from scratch.

Any ideas that I can look at before I take this drastic step.

FM3

[aerospace1]

That's quite the frustrating situation. How much RAM do you have?

I would imagine a clean re-format and re-install would fix things. There could be spyware involved that locks all resources randomly.

What does the Windows Performance Monitor look like during this first minute of recording? Is the RAM/processor/disk cache peaked?

[texasfm3]

For this very reason... I keep this PC off the net... it is totally stand alone with no network connection what so ever...

It has 1 GIG of RAM.

Like I said it was running beautiful for a couple of years and then bab it starts flaking out.

Watching the Monitor I see nothing peaking... Perhaps a total wipe down ad reinstall is my only recourse

Sounds like a CPU/RAM load problem. Do what aerospace said and press CTRL+ALT+DEL and look at the Performance tab to see what's going on. Open it up before you start Audition, then record as normal and watch the Performance meters.

Some possible causes off the top of my head:

• Not enough RAM/CPU power
• Not enough free disk space
• Not enough RAM/page file being used
• Something running in the background that's causing CPU load or spikes
• Recording at too high of a sample rate, and/or you have too many effects on and it's eating your CPU

Originally Posted by texasfm3

For this very reason... I keep this PC off the net... it is totally stand alone with no network connection what so ever...

It has 1 GIG of RAM.

Like I said it was running beautiful for a couple of years and then bab it starts flaking out.

Watching the Monitor I see nothing peaking... Perhaps a total wipe down ad reinstall is my only recourse

Try just uninstalling/reinstalling Audition first. If it works then it will save you a bunch of time.

I've had to do that every so often when I was still using Audition. I'd start getting weird problems and couldn't fix it so I just reinstalled it.

[RawDepth]

It could possibly be heat related. After a year or two dust can build up under cooling fans in places where ventilation is critical. An increase of a few degrees could make a big difference in its behavior. I would give the machine a good cleaning.

Also, try running it under a load while the machine is open (with good ventilation) to see if the problem changes.

The three parts that are most prone to crash under a load are power supply, memory, and cpu. Swap them out one at a time, with spares if you can, to determine the problem area.

Good luck,
RD

[texasfm3]

Thanks All,

I will investigate and see what I might hit upon.

FM3

[NegadivOne]

Sometimes I have problems in Audition if I open it up before I turn on my firewire interface. It will freeze and lockup randomly. But it is just fine when I turn on the interface first. Probably not what's happening for you but I thought I would throw it out there.