Stereo Tool

I received a bug report that the stand alone version of Stereo Tool 5.00 and 5.01 hangs or closes after 2-3 hours, running with ASIO on a ESI Juli@ sound card.

I just managed to reproduce this here, without ASIO, but with the same ESI Juli@ sound card. And it took a lot longer (about a day) for the hangup to occur.

Another attempt (not using the Juli@ card) is still running, I'll have to wait to see what happens to it.

I'm now running a new test with ASIO.


If anyone else has seen this issue - or not! - please report it here, also if you have a different sound card or had the issue with an older version, or a plugin version (I don't know if it's a specific Juli@ problem - there have been similar issues due to Juli@ driver problems in the past - or a generic Stereo Tool problem - nothing has changed in the sound card access part of the software - or has nothing to do with the sound card at all).

Please also report your OS.

(I can probably reproduce it myself, but if it takes about a day per attempt, having more info might speed up the analysis of the issue).


So something like this:
Stereo Tool 5.01 (release)
ESI Juli@ input @ 192000 Hz
ESI Juli@ normal output
ESI Juli@ FM output
No ASIO
Windows Vista 64
After running properly for almost a day, Stereo Tool stopped processing data (waveform display doesn't change anymore, but still gets updated when 'Bypass all' is enabled and disabled). Stereo Tool still responds to keys that are being pressed. RESET in Configure sound cards window does not have any effect. After trying to close Stereo Tool it became unresponsive and I had to kill it.

This is the report that I received earlier:

Version of StereoTool: 5.01
OS: Win XP SP2
Sound Card: ESI Juli@
Program close after 2-3 hours (computer at this time work w/o overloads. Processor load 30-40%.
We use StereoTool as stand alone software.
We tried StereoTool 5.00 and got same bug.
StereoTool close itself. In last time program hangs. Buttons was enabled, but not functional. I saw at program caption title "no registered" instead "registered by __________". We use Asio built-in Juli@ sound card.

Extra note about the Juli@ driver. Some time ago I have seen the following issue.

This is how audio playback should work:
- I send blocks of audio to Windows to be played on a specific sound card
- Whenever a block has been played, Windows (the sound card driver) sets a bit somewhere in memory to indicate that the audio has been played
- When I see that bit, I release the memory that I used for playback.

If - for some reason - this bit does not get set, I stop cleaning up the data. The amount of data that's available for output audio is limited, so after a few seconds the buffer will get full and Stereo Tool will start to wait until the data gets released - which doesn't happen.

Now this should never occur, because the bit should get set. But I've seen this happen with earlier versions of the Juli@ driver (even immediately after starting Stereo Tool, causing it to hangup nearly immediately).

This does however not explain the "not registered" message (actually nothing would explain that...). And it doesn't explain hangups when using ASIO. So I might be looking in the wrong direction here.

i am using:

- StereoTool Standalone 5.01
- FM out
- Juli@ with ASIO (with last XP driver v1.23)
- WinXP SP2

...and i never saw that bug!

I am to using:

- StereoTool Standalone 5.01
- Normal out
- Juli@ with ASIO
- WinXP SP2

...now i don't have this bug

I can confirm now that there is a bug somewhere in the stand alone version that might cause strange behavior (crashing or other things). Cause is not yet known.

Is it something with specific OS (xp, vista or w7) ?

I don't know yet. All I can see so far is that after running for some time - sometimes short (minutes), sometimes long (day?), so basically unpredictable - something (the heap) gets corrupted. All I can do now is start Stereo Tool with different filters turned on each time, then wait for a very long time to see if the problem occurs.

By the way, the fact that the heap gets corrupted doesn't even have to cause a crash. But it can. THAT probably depends on OS / system / ....

Really strange ...
I have never seen this happen!

i am still running v5.01 at FM .. and it's still up since day one.

Maybe other Filter combination causes that.. and/or Jula's driver for Vista or W7 is not so stable....

XP still rulez

I agree with you Bojcha, but only for my streaming PC do I run XP. That's because all the software and plugins I use I know work with XP, and I don't feel like fighting with windows 7 to get it all working again. All my other PC's I do use Windows 7 32 and 64bit depending on PC. I have to say it is the best OS Microsoft has made yet.

-n4-