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Audio Vault AV Air Freeze-ups

T

trackertalent

Guest
The station I work for part-time uses the Audio Vault system (I don't know the exact version). Occasionally (more often than we'd like) AV Air freezes for approximately 30 seconds and then corrects itself. Specifically, the studio's AV Air screen (which executes the playlist) locks up. We are NOT using touch-screen; events are executed by start buttons on the console and there is also a keyboard nearby if needed. When a freeze occurs, anything that is normally continuously updated on the screen, such as the clock, timers and progress indicators stops updating. At the same time, console buttons are ignored. However, these freezes have not affected playback. If AV Air is in full auto mode, it will continue executing the playlist. But if in manual mode, when the event currently playing ends, nothing more will play. However, while it ignores buttons from the console during a freeze, it will 'remember' any manual execution attempted and, when AV Air unfreezes, it will start any event whose console button was pressed. This means, if we push three start buttons on the console in a dire attempt to get something on the air, AV Air will start all of those events simultaneously when it 'wakes up.'

Anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this, or ideas as to what we might check for?

Thanks muchly.
 
If you are running airboss for copy on that machine it can cause this. If the connection from AvAir to the airboss machine croaks, AVAir will get bogged down looking for it. I have also had this happen with streaming boxes connected via the network for control/insert (That seems to be rare however)

What version? What OS? would be a big help.

Look in Windows event viewer and see if there is anything there, or in the Av Trace logs.
 
Ditto on what the others said--look for error reports in Event Viewer. I worked on an iMediatouch machine with similiar symptons. The problem was failing hardware, which was disclosed by entries in Event Viewer.

Good Luck..
 
FYI if anyone is trying to get through to BE for tech support (and probably sales too), they are without power following a big storm Sunday night. I tried to get through several times today and the phone rang and rang. Finally someone did pick up and explained what was going on. She was taking phone numbers and said they hoped to have tech support back online tomorrow. Maybe they had just one plain old Ma Bell phone plugged into the demarc box with this poor woman answering it!
 
Being a 20 year I.T. Vet, I'd vote that it's a hard drive issue. Bad Sector, Bad Head, Bad Drive. Typically the computer will freeze all IRQ lanes while constantly re-trying to read from the drive, thus the "lock up". The "hot keys" on the console (I'll assumed are patched through the keyboard (PS/2) bus) stay in the keyboard buffer, so that when resources do finally free up - you get a swath of commands carried out.

Look for disk or atapi events in the 'system' event log.
 
Thanks for the feedback thus far. As I said, I'm a part-time (weekend) A/T, so I'll try to get AV and Windows version numbers this weekend. From what I could see by the Windows task bar, there are a couple of other AV-related apps running on this computer: AV Time, AV Scan and one other, whose name escapes me. But no AirBoss. That's a for-sure, because this station prints a new sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper for each time the same piece of copy is read live.

Our CE is not the easiest guy to talk to, he's understandably very protective of his domain, and I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate a part-timer investigating this stuff, even though my intentions are good. So I definitely don't have access to AV logs or Event Viewer. However, while my PD tells me these lock-ups have been reported to Engineering in the past, they say they couldn't find anything.

I don't know if I mentioned it in my initial post, but the lock-ups I've experienced seem to last about 30 seconds, and they've never thus far affected audio playback, so the post made by bvw (bad HD, or sector, or head) is very intriguing. I'm very tempted to suggest it - although through someone of higher authority; maybe the PD.

Again, I'll try to get the version numbers this weekend. I think I know where to find the AV version number (from one of the items under the 'Menu' button on the AV Air screen, right?) I really appreciate the help. Thanks again.
 
UPDATE:

We are running AV Air version 9.20.8701 under Windows XP (I will assume the Professional version of XP, as all other computers in the place are the same).

Hope this helps narrow down the potential causes of the freeze-ups.

Thanks!
 
Additional Info:

I've also noticed that the mouse/cursor on the AV Air screen is NOT affected. I can move the cursor while the AV Air screen is frozen, so I'm assuming that Windows is still functioning normally.
 
The additional info is good, but I would still have a look at event viewer. If event viewer lists errors, then you've probably found the problem.
 
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