Random Failure of animation window to display correctly

[Ralph A]

Hello,

This is very puzzling to me. This is my third song to sequence and this has yet to come up. When playing back the portion that I've sequenced, in radom order it fails to show up on the animation screen. If I replay the very same section it may show up (i.e. lights on) and a different cell that is suppose to be on fails to come on in the animation window.

I then proceeded to check the actual track and the channel id box also fails to light up in correlation with the animation. I then went back and rechecked the cells that were giving me problems and they still did along with others. The song is recorded in wav format. I have also, checked my other sequences and they are fine. I've also shut down and restarted with no answers. I'm stumped!



Any ideas as to what the problem may be? Thanks

[Guest wbottomley]

1st question... what version are you running?

[Ralph A]

LOR 2.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with the song, inthat the way it was recorded? i.e. something went wrong? All looks ok, but I was thing of re recording it. It is not MP3 , Windows media audio (fixed @ 128 k) but I just hate to start all over! Yet better now than later.

Thanks

[Denny]

Ralph,

I had the same problem with S2; I never figured out what was happening, but here is how I corrected it. My sequencing grid is .05 seconds. I was doing a chase over 16 channels that only lasted .05 seconds on each channel. After two frustrating days, I put a.05 second fade up in front of the existing .05 second and the problem went away. All I can think of is that the timing was so quick that the computer could not always keep up with it. I don't know if it would have carried forward to actual control of the lights as I never hooked up a controller to check.

[Guest wbottomley]

It needs to be an mp3 or a wav file.

[Ralph A]

Denny, My problems also are with .05 sections of music. However, that is my standard setting on all sequences, and have had on problems on others. Thanks for the input at least I'm not the only one with this problem, but have yet to correct it.



William, Question. When the music is ripped from the CD, in Windows and in options you select from the following; Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio (variable bit rate), Windows Media Audio (looseless) or mp3. The correct setting is Windows Media Audio. Is this not wav?

[Don]

Ralph A wrote:

William, Question. When the music is ripped from the CD, in Windows and in options you select from the following; Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio (variable bit rate), Windows Media Audio (looseless) or mp3. The correct setting is Windows Media Audio. Is this not wav?

WMA (Windows Media Audio) is not the same as a .wav file.

Try ripping it to MP3, then using a program like Audacity to save it to a .wav file.

[-klb-]

I believe I have also read that there is a "feature" in the sequence editor that the animation window will throttle the number of elements that get displayed when they are scheduled to be lit for 0.1 second or less. I believe it is a holdover from LOR 1 when the animation code was not as efficient as it is in S2. I believe it was indicated that it should not impact the control of the lights. With typical displays you are probably fine, but if you want some comfort about it, hook up a controller and some lights.

Of course, with larger (hundreds of channel) displays, you are subject to bandwidth limits on the RS-485 bus and delays there.

- Kevin

[LightORamaDan]

The effect that you see is a consequence of the the way the code displays the animation window and the buttons.

With the original software we needed to throttle the screen update rate to get reasonable performance on lower power machines. With S2 we the code is much more efficient but we did not throttle code was left in.

I plan to have an option added that allows the user to adjust the refresh rate. This will fix the problem. If the PC is capable of a "true" representation then the code will deliver it.

Dan

[Ralph A]

In the last few days I have completed the following;

Where the problems did exist I changed from .05 to .20 and the animation functioned as it should. I then changed the timing back and did connect the lights and it functioned correctly. Now it's back to our regularly scheduled sequencing!

Thanks for your advice and help!!!
Ralph

[bob]

I then changed the timing back and did connect the lights and it functioned correctly

Just to be clear, the behavior of your actual lights should never be affected by this. It's only a display issue in the Sequence Editor's onscreen representation.