Blue screen on Win7

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Blue screen on Win7

2015-02-09 03:23 pm

Hello!

I can't figure out why I keep getting blue screen on Windows when I'm recording a score.

I try to be more specific:

These days I've been recording a lot of music with Nero 10 Wave Editor, while playing it on NWC (ver 2.51a). Until yesterday afternoon all was going well, but suddently my system became unstable: every time I try to record a score while it's being played on NWC, after some time I either get blue screen while the song is being recorded (not always at the same point) and my PC reboots, or NWC gets stuck, keeps playing a couple of notes even though I try to stop it and (most strangely) doesn't even switch off, even if I try to kill it from the task manager. The only thing I'm able to do in this case is to manually restart my computer by the case button, since it won't even exit Windows and reboot on its own. On the other hand, If I just play songs with NWC, all goes well without any problem.

If you ask me what has changed yesterday, I really can't tell: I had not installed any software, nor changed any setting... It just began to be unstable, that's it. Even Nero Wave Editor is always the same: it worked before, and it looks to work now. Maybe it's NWC to cause all crashes and stuff? The only error messages I get are those on the blue screen, but they disappear quickly and I don't know if and where they get recorded on my hard drive before my computer reboots automatically.

One thing I can say is that after the first time this problem occurred, I had to reinstall all soundfonts, because they had been magically uninstalled by the Audigy Soundbank Manager. This never happened again, though.

I'm running a 5 months old PC with Windows 7 Ultimate SP1, I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 5/Rx, a SSD C:/ with 110 GB of free space (51%) and 16 GB of RAM. The hardware wouldn't be an issue, I hope, since everything is 5 months old!

Any suggestion on what to try and to test?

Thank you!

Re: Blue screen on Win7

Reply #1 – 2015-02-10 12:19 am

Hi Aure,
My first port of call would be to clear temp files:

Two locations to consider:
c:\windows\temp
and your user specific location:

Normally the path of Temp folder will be

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp

but it CAN be eslwhere - the easiest way to tell for sure is to:

Click Start, in the search box, type CMD.
Right click on CMD and choose run as Administrator.
In the command prompt type ECHO %Temp%.

This will return the correct path.

Go into each of these two folders and DELETE everything you can. Depending on what you have running at the time some files will be open and unable to be deleted - this is OK, but make sure that NWC and Nero 10 are NOT open.

This will eliminate the posibility that a corrupt temp file is causing problems.

Another thing I would try is to download Audacity and try using it instead of Nero 10 - Audacity is free and very, very good.

Re: Blue screen on Win7

Reply #2 – 2015-02-10 06:23 pm

Hello!

I had already cleared all cache, deleted temporary files and scanned my system for viruses or malware. But still, thank you for your hints!

I was suggested Audacity by a friend as well: downloaded it and... guess what? The problem is the same! So it's not Nero, nor should it be Audacity. I guess it is either NWC-related or due to an excessive stress on the sound card while simultaneously playing a song and recording "what you can hear" with any other program (be it Nero, Audacity or whatever).

May it be a problem of complexity of the .nwc file? I now recall that before having any troubles my score used 24 midi channels (Sound Blaster Audigy Rx has the usual Synth A + Synth B, for a total of 32 midi channels [30 + 2 perc.]), and the newer problematic version of the score uses all 30 non-percussion channels. I tried today recording another score with less channels, and all went well.

I wonder why the complexity of the file should cause all these troubles, though.

Anyways, I now noticed that, when I first launch NWC (Composer, never tried with Viewer), open a complex song and hit F5, it gets kinda stuck for several seconds. After "meditating" for a while (7-10 seconds...), it starts playing normally. If I then stop the song and press F5 again, it starts playing immediately. So mysterious...

Re: Blue screen on Win7

Reply #3 – 2015-02-10 10:20 pm

Hi again Aure,
it's been a while but if I recall correctly, the SB series of cards had an adjustable sound font cache - this was actually taken from system RAM and set aside for the sound card to store the sound font in.

I've always felt this needed a little buffer space too and would never set it to the minimum, but to some arbitrary value above minimum. It may be that later versions automated this.

It is also possible that the soundfont itself has a bug...

As an experiment, why not try loading a smaller font?

Also, 30 channels is a lot when it can be quite reasonable to double some up E.G. if you have 4 trumpets, it's not unreasonable to have all 4 on a single channel (yes, I know this can introduce a few limitations, but I've never found them to be a problem)

Another consideration is the driver for the SB card itself - is it the latest?

That's all I have time for at the moment - good luck.