Zara stopping

[zman]

I have been using Zara for quite a few years, and I don't recall having this issue, so I am not sure what is up. I have about 10.5Gb of Christmas Music, somewhere around 2000 songs.

I have Zara set up to play my entire Christmas Library by setting up Playlist > Random Track at the top level directory. What is happening this year, no matter what I select from the Playlist options, Zara stops once a day. I have tried shuffle, which is supposed to repeat, I also have tried repeat.

I have exited Zara to delete the running list it creates, started it fresh, re set up the Random Track and it still stops. I don't recall having the problem at all in years past.

Figuring 2000 songs, there is a good 3.5 to 4 days of music, so I can see it stopping then but once a day is frustrating.

This time of year, I just broadcast my Christmas Music 24x7. It is frustrating when all of a sudden your listening in the yard and boom, I have to run into the house to restart play.

Ideas?

[Guest wbottomley]

Not exactly the same problem, but Zara is giving me a fit this year. I think it has to do with windows updates.

[zman]

This is a Win 7 machine, and I attempted to turn off the updates for the season.

[J_Plak]

Mark, do you have a AntiVirus scaning at that time ?

[J_Plak]

also look at your Zara log as you may see something there

[Richard Hamilton]

Oh man does this sound familiar. I had this problem during the summer (we run Zara all year long). The shutdown about every two days was driving me nuts. As it turned out, we had a song that was corrupt and every time Zara got to it, Zara choked and died. I replaced the song and then all was well. I am not sure if this is your issue or not, but it is at least one of the things that can go wrong. Perhaps you added some new songs since last year and one or more of them are corrupt?

[Richard Hamilton]

Oh I forgot to mention one other thing... Someone else mentioned this problem last year. In his case, he accidentially placed his DTMF stop tone (wav file) in his play folder. Every time Zara played the dtmf file, it stopped itself... ha!

[zman]

So the xxx.lst file has really nothing in it. I thought it would have something, but it is one line and cryptic. I thought this would be a running list of songs played.

I have been looking for a log file, and I am can't locate one.

It would be funny if a corrupt song got played around the same time every day, but I guess that is possible. How would you find out which song it is.

Antivirus scans once a week and not on Saturday for sure.

[J_Plak]

Mark,
go under options and enable logs also you can set wear the logs are :-)

[beeiilll]

I had this problem a week ago when I started up Zara for this season.
Turns out I forgot that I had an immediate stop command in the events folder to shut Zara off for my show. DUH.

I fixed that but also found that I too had a corrupt song in the list that would stop it as well.
I had to turn on the logs and wait for Zara to stop to find the damaged song so I could remove it.
Been running fine since then.

Bill

[zman]

Thanks guys, I just stopped Zara, set up enable logs and we will see what happens.

I did add a lot of music over the last year, so if there is a corrupt song I would never easily find it.

Now off to string a Mega Tree today. Set Up! is in full swing.

[Richard Hamilton]

beeiilll wrote:

I had this problem a week ago when I started up Zara for this season.
Turns out I forgot that I had an immediate stop command in the events folder to shut Zara off for my show. DUH.

I fixed that but also found that I too had a corrupt song in the list that would stop it as well.
I had to turn on the logs and wait for Zara to stop to find the damaged song so I could remove it.
Been running fine since then.

Bill

Yup.... that's the way I found my issue back in the summer. I turned on the log file and waited for it to croak :shock:

To comment on the curious point about why Zara might stop at the same time each day due to a corrupt song... it will occur if you are playing the list sequentially instead of randomly. I was playing my list sequentially because the random play feature of Zara really sucks. I don't think there is any algorithm being used at all. I've seen songs play twice in a row and sometimes even 3 times in a row.

[Greg]

I'm not saying this is a solution to your problem but I you can run a silence detector it can fource zara to start to play if a certain period of silence occurs.

here is a link to the one I use it is free, works great.

http://www.pira.cz/eng/silence.htm

greg