Stereo Tool

No, there is no video card. I'm using whatever is on the motherboard. Didn't see any reason to add a card.

As you know, Stereo Tool's on screen display is very colorful. When the program was frozen, everything was more greyscale than color. The computer is in a climate controlled room that never gets over 74 degrees F. and it has a large internal fan.

The monitor is left unplugged from the computer, but when it is plugged in, the display is visible. As I can access the computer over the in-house network, I want to see the program in action when I log in.

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We improve things by making them worse.

Hm now I'm still not 100% sure what you mean by this.

You could not start ST without rebooting - was that because Windows itself was completely unresponsive?

Discolored and too light can happen when an application crashes - but then you should still be able to kill and restart it. And normally there should be a message on screen that the application is unresponsive.

I couldn't get ST to reboot, possibly because I didn't know the best/quickest way to do that. And, as we were off the air, I went for the easy solution.

I'm trying to remember how I did it the first time it froze. I'm sure I just rebooted the computer, not just the program.

The IT guy (who actually built the computer) and I are going to look closely at it tomorrow and make sure nothing unnecessary is running. We purposely overbuilt the computer to avoid having this happen.

Don't think I mentioned that I put it back on line yesterday afternoon at 4PM. It sounds SO much better than my Optimods!

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We improve things by making them worse.

Anyway, if Windows was still running but you couldn't start ST (and I suppose other things still worked), then that points at a sound card driver error. The sound card driver would be in some incorrect state that doesn't allow restarting. There's nothing in ST that keeps running if you close or kill it, so for ST itself it should make no difference if you reboot the system or not.

I have seen and heard about similar behavior for some ESI cards... Which is in that case clearly caused by a driver issue (it's actually pretty simple to get it on tilt mode).

Are you using ASIO or normal I/O?

I think Phil is saying the computer just freezes (locks) and only a reboot will get it working again.Sounds like a driver issue. He didn't specify what win 7 version he was using 32 or 64.I had another eng friend have similar issues, switched to xp pro 32, no further issues.And i can certainly identify with computer and transmitter quirks that drive you crazy. I would think phil is using ASIO to get away from those famous windows driver issues..

O lol. I just completely forgot to look up the event log error. Here's some reading material:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/462 ... event-task#.

A lot more: https://www.google.nl/search?q=Event+ID ... 3&ie=UTF-8

Thanks! Definitely some food for thought...

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We improve things by making them worse.

The IP guy and I went through my ST computer and turned off anything unnecessary. Most of it was off. We'll see!

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We improve things by making them worse.

It locked up again Saturday afternoon. The screen was frozen and Stereo Tool would take no commands. A computer reboot fixed it.

I'm getting a lot of heat about these periodic failures indicating the unreliability of Stereo Tool...

Here's an oddity... The preset I use is labeled "Phil 3". But, when I reboot the computer, ST comes back with a previous preset "Phil 1". It did this in November, too... Weird.

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We improve things by making them worse.

Again, "screen was frozen" - does that mean that EVERYTHING was frozen or just Stereo Tool?
Also, if I were you I would replace the pc. Many people have been running Stereo Tool without a single issue for multiple years...

I can imagine that you don't like using beta versions, but the latest beta's have some new code built-in that restarts the sound card if no audio comes in or goes out.