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With 1602 MP3 controller, one song is out of sync by 1 sec, all other songs on SD cardare fine


jeffostroff

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This problem has been dogging me for 2 years now with this one song. I use the 1602 MP3 controller, and load all my sequences onto the SD card, programmed with the LOR Hardware program, using the MP3 tab on the software.

The song simulates perfectly like all my sequences do. But, once on the SD card, a one second delay on the lights from only this one song in the show? The other songs work fine.

I've done dozens of songs over the last 2 years with ZERO problems, and use 1/10 of a second grid. I do the most complicated songs, and sequences and they all simulate and synchronize perfectly. I got about 15 Halloween songs I just saved to my SD card for the LOR MP3 player, and they all play perfectly.

But one of them, is a short 1:15 long NFL sports football TV theme song, that when it's turn comes up on the MP3 card/controller, the lights seem to be off by about 1 second from the music.

But it simulates 100% perfectly, LOR animation window shows it to work perfectly down to the 1/10th of a second just like all my other songs. I never miss a beat. Simulates perfectly just like all my other songs!

But while the show is running in the MP3 Card, all the songs work perfectly except for this one Fox sports TV song. I've tried re-saving the MP3 file with Audacity as I always do, in constant bit rate MP3 format. I even resaved it last night after upgrading to the latest version of S2 and Media Player 11.

I tried making changes to the LOR sequence file to see if it maybe it just happened to be compiled wrong, but nothing seems to help. I've tried different SD cards, I've tried rubbing my belly in a circular motion while patting my head as I slide the SD card into the MP3 board. No dice!

Anyone seen this before?

This is most baffling, most frustrating, and it can’t be anything that I am doing wrong. I've never had a failure like this one before.

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Mountainwxman, I leave the Lock Step checkbox unchecked by default when I write to the SD cards. Lock Step is only used for maintaining sync for large displays, and even though I like to think of my 128 channels as "big", it certainly does not need that feature anyway so I never use it. I still had the software open from last night and took a look at it, and it still is defaulting to unchecked.

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I had a problem last year with one song and did not know it until th last 2 days of the season.

I thought the WIW song was playing but it took 40 minutes into the routine before it was scheduled to play. What would happen is it just skipped the song and went to the next one.

I was puzzled for several hours trying figure out why it would not play. Looked at the SD card, saw the 2 files for WIW and clicked on the mp3 file for the WIW sequence, it played just fine with the MP3 extension.

Well looking further finally discovered that the audio file was not a MP3 file but a WAV file. The show editor was not checking for the proper audio format, it assumed all audio files are MP3.

Audacity to the rescue and made a MP3 audio file, generated a new program file and everything worked fine on WIW after that.

Now what can also happen is the MP3 file is not a CBR MP3 @ 128K. I have seen skewing on the final playing that did not show up when making the sequence.

Run the audio file through Audacity again and check the timing again.

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I mentioned in my first post of this thread that I already ran the song through Audacity again last night and re-saved it as an mp3. The audio file plays perfectly, it's just off by 1 second. Certainly way more time to be an issue with Constant Bit Rate.

Today I sent the file to Lightorama and dan could not duplicate it there. They sent me a re-processed version of the song which I will try out tonight.

Dan also suggested I try upgrading the firmware on my MP3 Director. I'll report back here.

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I upgraded the firmware on the controller to 4.32 and verified the version with hardware controller software. I also updated the mp3 card firmware, still no help.

How can I verify the MP3 card got the firmware, I don't see a field in hardware controller to read it out.

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Do a refresh for the controller, it will say what the firmware number is in the controller box

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jeffostroff wrote:

I upgraded the firmware on the controller to 4.32 and verified the version with hardware controller software. I also updated the mp3 card firmware, still no help.

How can I verify the MP3 card got the firmware, I don't see a field in hardware controller to read it out.


When you download firmware the Hardware Utility will report success or failure. Also in the manual for the DC-MP3 there is a pattern for the LEDs (during powerup) that denotes the version of firmware.

Not sure what is going on here. When everything except one song is okay then I would suspect the mp3 file but the mp3 file that you sent to us seem to work okay in a mp3 director and things seemed to be in sync.

In the worst case you can try skewing the track 1/2 sec and see if that helps bring things into sync.
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