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G4 Director - Why did they limit it to only 99 sequences for a show? My original DC-MP3 Director wasn't limited to 99 sequences.


Orville

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Would really like to know why the newer directors that can handle more networks and up to a 32GB SD Card are LIMITED to only 99 sequences for a show?

I went to add in my usual off hours musical show sequences, currently at 222 sequences, this was never an issue for the ORIGINAL LOR DC-MP3 Director and that using only up to a 2GB SD Card.  So this one really threw me a curve ball, because the shows are limited to a specific number {9 if I recall}, and now that the sequences have been limited to less than what I've used in the past for off hours time to just play music until show time, well no way I can do that and add the shows too now.

What was the reason to limit the new Directors {G4} to only 99 sequences, especially when the Hub allowed me to select all 222 sequences, then crashed one it got to 99, apparently when trying to write file 100 up, you have to keep clicking OK about 2 to 3 times on the pop up windows that open stating there is an issue with writing the "stripped header" of the next MP3 file in line, until you click enough times to finally get out of it, no way to abort this process when this happens, nor does it state it's really because it won't write the SD card file sequences past the 99th one.

On my older DC-MP3 Director, the LOR original one, for my off hours show like this I have had up to 350 sequences in one off hours show at times.

Just wondering why this has changed when the older original Directors only used up to a 2GB card and could handle hundreds of sequences, and the new G4 Director is limited to specifically 99 sequences per show?   I just find this a bit frustrating, because I can not understand why the G4 Director has a limitation put on it like this.

 

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I promise you won't like my answer ...

But you'd be one of the very, very, very few people trying to put more than 99 sequences in a show. I could send another 3 paragraphs repeating the same thing, but I won't.

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13 hours ago, Don said:

I promise you won't like my answer ...

But you'd be one of the very, very, very few people trying to put more than 99 sequences in a show. I could send another 3 paragraphs repeating the same thing, but I won't.

I've had up to 350 on the original DC-MP3 Director.  So it doesn't make sense to now limit the newer ones that have a more powerful processor, along with larger capacity SD cards.

The show is strictly an OFF HOURS type, these are 1 channel sequences only, no lighting commands of any kind and used specifically to play music during my shows off hours time during a specific time..

So there is no reason why the Hub or HU should have a limitation of 99 sequences.  99 Sequences doesn't even cover the time frame I play the Off Hours show in, from 6AM-5:20PM, 11 hours and 20 minutes in total for play time.  And it only takes 132 sequences of songs that are 5 minutes each to cover that span, but seeing the songs are a variety of times from 1-1/2 to 8 minutes, the 222 sequences of songs I have is almost at that exact time span, that way I'm not playing the same song over and over, which would be boring having to be forced to only 99 songs now.

It wasn't an issue with the older software and original DC-MP3 Director, and I do not see why this limitation has now been put in place on the newest S4/S5 software and Director units.   Sorry, just doesn't make sense to me when it wasn't this way in the beginning.  Just seems that's going backwards and not going forward like it should.

 

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I promise you won't like my answer ...

But you'd be one of the very, very, very few people trying to put more than 99 sequences in a show. I could send another 3 paragraphs repeating the same thing, but I won't.

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/13/2020 at 12:53 AM, Don said:

I promise you won't like my answer ...

But you'd be one of the very, very, very few people trying to put more than 99 sequences in a show. I could send another 3 paragraphs repeating the same thing, but I won't.

 

Maybe this answer is appropriate the first time but I don't think he's asking if he's the only one doing this.  Why would something that's advertised as an "upgrade" actually downgrade your capabilities?  Is it a hardware limitation since this one now has two more networks?

I don't hold grudges, and I won't now, but I'm the one that doesn't like the answer.  He's posted almost 4300 messages, been a member since 2011, helps anyone that wants it,  and I think he's asking a question that deserves an answer with a bit more explanation other than "Only you would want more."

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Never said "only you would want more"

To quote a LOR Staff member from another thread (and a different topic), "At some point you have to draw a line on what is and is not supported."

 

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46 minutes ago, Don said:

Never said "only you would want more"

 

 

You know your right...he didn't ask for more, and for that I'm sorry.  All he asked for was feature parity.  As a software tester for well over 15 years, I can see both sides.  When a feature that was once supported is no longer supported, it just raises a question as to why.  There will always be someone using the software to the upper limits.

Thanks for the answer you gave...

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On 12/14/2020 at 1:21 PM, BluMan said:

You know your right...he didn't ask for more, and for that I'm sorry.  All he asked for was feature parity.  As a software tester for well over 15 years, I can see both sides.  When a feature that was once supported is no longer supported, it just raises a question as to why.  There will always be someone using the software to the upper limits.

Thanks for the answer you gave...

And I have yet to see why this limitation was set in place when the original director would allow as many sequences as I needed.   I actually have well over 2500 songs I could use, and the old original DC-MP3 Director I had used years ago would have supported every one of those sequences.  

Now I have to waste SHOW space because I have to now break everything down into 99 sequences per show, which now puts limitations on how I had intended to use the New N4-G4 Director I purchased since I now require several networks because of the pixels I've added to my show and I wanted to get away from using a computer {which doesn't have any limitations}. 

I could understand a limitation a lot more if I'd just get a decent answer as to why this is the way it is now.  As for the statement on drawing the line, if the original unit wasn't limited in this fashion, then that line is nothing more than a cop out as far as I'm concerned.

I had a question as to why a newer unit that is supposedly loaded with MORE processing power, allows for up to 4 networks is limited to a 99 sequence limit, which for a lot of us that use Directors, we do use them to run an off hours show, which originally in my case was 350+/- sequences in SHOW8 which ran from 7am-5:25pm 7 days a week through the Christmas Season, now I have to have a SHOW6, SHOW7 and SHOW8 for the 222 off hours music sequences I'm using this year.  And I felt that all these NO LIGHTING COMMANDS, SINGLE CHANNEL SEQUENCES should have been placed in a SINGLE SHOW, not be required to break them into 3 different shows.

But it looks like this question will never really be answered.  

If I could HACK software, I'd remove that blasted limitation.  If my original Director would have had this limitation, I WOULD NOT be complaining about it now, because I'd know that's how it was, but it wasn't.  At least not on the unit I had!

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5 hours ago, Orville said:

And I have yet to see why this limitation was set in place when the original director would allow as many sequences as I needed.   I actually have well over 2500 songs I could use, and the old original DC-MP3 Director I had used years ago would have supported every one of those sequences.  

Actually it most likely does have a limit - you just happened to not run into it.  Very few things in computers that are "unlimited" REALLY are unlimited.  But the limit is high enough that no one notices.  Limits can be written into code for many different reasons - some arbitrary and some for very real limitations.  At some point, as a software or maybe hardware designer, you have to look at the usage of whatever you are writing and ask yourself something like this:  I can engineer around this limit, but it will cost me [fill in the blank some amount of time, or RAM, or processor limit, or performance, or dollars, or whatever it is], but no one would ever need to go past this limit.  Is it worth fixing?  And then someone does something with the product that no one anticipated and ran into some limit.

YOU are trying to do something that is outside the intended use of the product.  That means that YOU get to deal with it not working the way YOU would like it to.

 

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The limit has always been 99 since the first MP3 directors were created as far as I can tell.  I looked through the old code and see the references to 99 back into S1 - almost 20 years ago.

I'm the one that has worked on that code since S2 (in everything from the Hardware Utility, Simple Show Builder, and now Hub) for every generation since the first.  I have worked on that code for 12 years now and it has never been anything but 99.  That goes all the way back to S2, so even if it was a change (and I doubt that it was and don't see where it ever could have been), it's at least 12 years old and would have included every generation of director produced after the very first one (and that includes the last 3 generations - mDMP3, the uMP3/MP3G3, and all the G4s).

If I had the time, I could go further back and prove that it has always been 99.  I know the technical reasons why it's 99 and those reasons would apply all the way back to the very first MP3 director created.

The 99 limit is NOT something new.  I know it's been that limit for at least the 12 years I have worked on that code, and am 99% sure it has been that way from the beginning. 

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Thank you for the answer Mike, then my Director must have been unique, because I looked at an older SD Card that won't work in the new G4 and there was a show on it that had 325 sequences on it, listed as S1FILE01 all the way to S1FILE325.  If it wasn't supposed to do it, have no idea why it allowed the creation of such a large show file and I always used the HU to create my shows.   Just find it strange that it supported it and ran it since you state it's always been this way.

Too bad those SD Cards didn't work in the new N4-G4 or I wouldn't have formatted the SD Cards that had this info on them and would have sent you one of the SD Cards so you could see I literally wrote shows with much more than 99 files per show for the off hours sequences I used only for playing music using it.   Because maybe that would have given you some idea as to why it wrote and played every one of those sequences in it.  

I don't know why, or how it did it since you say the code has always been limited to 99, I just know the DC-MP3 Director I had did do this.  And I used the unit for 4 years before a component fell out of it at then end of its run on that 4th year, then it would no longer recognize any SD Card inserted into it.

I'm not doubting your word, just find it odd the DC-MP3 Director I had, and the HU allowed me to enter that many files/sequences into a single show and wrote them out to the SD Card and the Director ran them.

Sorry for being a stubborn mule on this, but I really believed there was no limitation of 99 sequences because of my own experience with the one I had that didn't have this limit.

And please feel free to close and lock this thread.  Answer is accepted.  Again, thank you.

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On 12/19/2020 at 12:21 AM, Orville said:

and there was a show on it that had 325 sequences on it, listed as S1FILE01 all the way to S1FILE325.

I can't stop people from creating whatever they want on an SD card manually.  If it worked for you, then that was a bug that has now been fixed.  The official supported number of sequences for a show since the beginning has been 99.

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13 hours ago, DevMike said:

I can't stop people from creating whatever they want on an SD card manually.  If it worked for you, then that was a bug that has now been fixed.  The official supported number of sequences for a show since the beginning has been 99.

That's the odd part of it.  I never created anything manually, always through the HU using CTRL-A to select all the sequences in a folder and write out to the SD Card.  

Now I'm wondering if the SD Card Writer/Reader I was using had anything to do with writing out that many sequences to the SD Card.  I was not using the LOR SD Card Writer/Reader, I had a different unit I was using.    This is the first time I have used the SD Card Writer/Reader that LOR supplied with the Director.  

If I could have found my old one I'd been using in the past that had slots for every type SD Card out there, I'd still be using it.   If I ever find it, I'll connect it up and see what happens when writing a Show to an SD Card using it.  If it works like it did with the original DC-MP3 Director, I'll report back and let you know the type SD Card Writer/Reader, SD Card used and any other info you might need to see why that SD Card Writer/Reader bypasses the 99 sequence set limits, if it does. 

Like stated I never created anything manually, not even sure I would even know how to do that.   If I did, I'd have already tested that theory out.   But the new set up with multi-networks and the special files that are created, I wouldn't even know how to begin creating those manually for all the RGB items now in my display.  I'd just mess something up trying that and I know it!

I know this is supposed to be set internally by the software, but wondering if in some way, or somehow, the Hardware being used, the SD Card Writer/Reader I was using somehow circumvented that 99 sequence limit?   I would not think that could be possible, but stranger things have happened.   Or there may have been a bug {as you stated and now been corrected} I was using that I thought was "normal", so I never really brought up issues back when this happened because I thought that was "normal" for the Director to handle large sequence limits, when in fact, it wasn't supposed to be allowing this at all.

And like stated, I accept the answer and I wouldn't have been chirping so loudly on it if this had never happened with my set up back in 2010 when I officially started in this hobby.

Again, thank you for your time and answers DevMike.  They are very much appreciated,

 

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