PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB consistently crashed by Juke Box

Are the files being stored on FAT drive or NTFS?

I have seen Win7 balk at FAT stored files in the middle of a transfer, maybe this is inherited from Vista (?)
Just a thought.. could be the program 'expects' ntsf...

Have you disabled UAC in Vista and are you running as Admin in XP or at least running an account in XP that has file permissions set to read & write.

Okay, everybody, here's what I know so far:

*This problem is reproducible much the same as reported here on my machine, which also is running XP SP3.

*I have discovered through trial and error with the cmd prompt that the attribute for the folder NAME and not the folder itself is what really reverts.

*BUT the biggest discover has come from copying this folder to new smaller folders that contain ten or twenty songs each. That narrowed things down and I started to notice a pattern of two different events. Setting my jukebox to play only 2 bars of Preview helped speed the process up a bit.

In the first of the smaller folders, the Jukebox would cause the No Responding from BB while the music still keeps on playing at the same songfile every time.

So I created another subfolder named, "Bad Songs" and began removing each of those. No small feat as foxylady's folder as sent contained about 185 files. Creting the smaller subsets of song lists in subfolders at least let me get to the point where I can play all the remaining songs in some of those subfolders in the Jukebox mode with no freezing. Okay, as I suspected earlier in this thread, the problem then appears to be caused by corrupted songfiles. Just to be sure, I spent a little bit of time running the Jukebox both on my own custom folders and on a pgmusic demo folder or two, same 2-bar preview parameters and not one single freeze.

**One thing I found out is that in some cases, the song that is playing when the freeze occurs is the corrupt file. -- BUT there were a few cses where the previous songfile to play was the one causing the same problem as well.

*Where I'm at right now:

I now can play all of foxylady's remaining songs from the subfolders just fine.

But when I thought all was well and tried to copy and paste all those remaining songs into one new folder, there are occasional freezes still happening.

Looking into that.

As of right now, I've isolated 21 corrupted songfiles.

Trying to save as much of foxylady's work as I can,


--Mac

Have isolated perhaps the last few corrupted culprits.

Right now, the remains of the folder are Juking away, 2 bars at a time in the background while I surf the web, am about halfway thru the folder with no probs, fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, I don't think anything can be done to save those 23 corrupted songfiles easily, although I've not had time to get really deep into THAT subject yet.

Have a theory on what must've happened at foxylady's place, but not ready to share that one yet without a bit more detective work. And even then, it may forever be out there in ConjectureLand.


--Mac

When you say "corrupted", do you mean that you have been able to identify some fault in the files, or simply that removing the files from the folder allows Juke Box to proceed?

Ooops - the e-mail notification of this post's appearance on the forum was put into my Spam Suspects folder, and I got to it after I'd posted my question on the diagnosis of corruption.

It's clear that it's an empirical diagnosis - a file which causes Juke Box to hang is (by definition) corrupt.

There is an alternative explanation - that these are files which reveal a fault in BIAB's Juke Box feature.

The origins of many of these files go back ten years or so, and they've been used mostly for practice and for the production of lead sheets. Our recent introduction of RealTracks to our systems has led us to upgrade some of the instruments from MIDI to RealTracks, but I think we'll still have the old MIDI tracks in backup folders that we could go back to, and avoid the need to rewrite them all.

Thanks, Mac, for all your work in investigating this for us.

Last night I (finally) got a folder that played all the way through from end to end in Jukebox.

I still don't believe this is a bug in BiaB, though.

And that is simply because *Any Other Folder of Songs I Have Here, And I Have Many, Does Not Exhibit This Jukebox Malfunction* -- only your folder of songs that you sent to me.

There is a clue somewhere in this thread. When you said that you hit the X to get out of a frozen BiaB. I *always* use ctrl-alt-del when BiaB freezes like that. If I don't, and continue working without a reboot, then the problem complicates as certain parts of BB likely didn't shut down or get cleared properly from memory cache, etc. This will indeed make you think that the program itself is written poorly as resources go on the decline, but the real reason for it is that BiaB MUST be abole to address its own critical and volatile files by writing to them when the program closes down. A freeze prevents that from happening - and worse yet, can corrupt the file to the point that if you just reopen BB and continue working, you run the risk of *all files after that point that you save can also become corrupted*.

I think that is the case here.

Matter of fact, I am the one who asked Peter Gannon if he could develop the "Return to Factory Settings" menu item because I used to have to do it so much and before the advent of that automated feature you had to open the bb folder and search for files and delete them in order to do the same thing. --And it was brought about for precisely the reason mentioned above, I did NOT do that only one time when BB froze up and, of course, that was night when I was preparing a LOT of work-critical resaves and the like.

There was no rhyme nor reason that I could figure out as to *which* files were corrupted and what was possibly corrupted in them, but my situation was presenting a rather different difficulty than this Jukebox situation. I never even thought about trying the Jukebox on those files back then, so I don't know what they would have done there.

I'm still investigating and testing, though.


--Mac