OMT Media Touch ongoing problems - lag between audio cuts

[audiophile.]

Bill,

A couple quick questions:

What does your countdown timer do at the end of the sound file when playing?  Does it keep counting after the audio ends?  Does the timer stop counting when the audio stops, or does it 'gray' out and after the pause the next file starts playing?

The reason I ask is I've had the exact same problem, but in my case the clock went to gray right at the audio ending yet continued counting for one or two seconds.  In my case after troubleshooting (and some dumb luck), I managed to isolate the problem to a bad sound card.  I replaced the existing Audioscience sound card with a good ol' Soundblaster card, balanced up the audio using a Henry Matchbox and had not seen the problem after.

I think Howard might be on to something here.  I'm not sure he had a "bad card" but a maybe a issue with a driver or how the software buffers it? 

With Audioscience they have a large amount of ram on the board which must be filled before the audio begins (or there is not much point to the ram, is there).  This prevents skipping but it does take time, not much time, but some time.

A Soundblaster cuts corners on the ram, but it would respond faster.  Personally I like the old Santa Cruz cards which handle the overlaps super nice.

I think you might want to try it...

[ChiefOperator]

"How do other stations handle media that gets recorded daily such as features and news items? If the feature is saved too late, or the spot load too light, the cut ends up getting queued up too soon. When I deal with this from the news room I go in to logtools and move my own news cut then save/import and move it back."

We are able to add, delete, or edit any cut right up until it is cued to air.  That is, as long as the cut has not moved into one of the four "cue" positions on the PTA, it can be modified, but once in cue position, no changes can be made. 

HOWEVER, even if the cut has moved into cue, you can still change its sequence on the PTA side by left click over the events time, hold down and drag up or down.  We do this all the time when we want to change the sequence of the PTA events.  No need at all to go into Log Tools.   

[aberdeenman]

well as many times as I've thought we RESOLVED this issue, I think I can say it is resolved. Fragmentation. we had audio files on the machine fragmenting every hour, I had defrag setup to run twice daily which served as my red herring. Audio was playing back fine within the hour after my scheduled defrags. Looking at fragmentation a few hours later just about every file that had been played had some level of fragmentation. I setup Contig to be run on the local audio drives every 27 minutes and we haven't heard a spot run over since.

Contig is a quickfix while Diskeeper is being ordered, it seems that every time an audio file is cued/played, an entry is added to it's chunk data to reflect 'last played' this opens up the system to file fragmentation. I think this has more to do with different machines being sold when stations buy the software - our's came on HP/Compaq dc5700 Microtowers, which use SATA drives, I doubt anyone with a system more than 3 years old has SATA drives.

[DudeFan]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing your solution. I'm going to add that to my troubleshooting quiver. The one issue that we have results from the OS locking a file down during backup, where MediaTouch will think it is playing audio, but simply counts down the length of the file. Doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it occurs during the backup window overnights into Monday morning.

[aberdeenman]

We are able to add, delete, or edit any cut right up until it is cued to air.  That is, as long as the cut has not moved into one of the four "cue" positions on the PTA, it can be modified, but once in cue position, no changes can be made. 

HOWEVER, even if the cut has moved into cue, you can still change its sequence on the PTA side by left click over the events time, hold down and drag up or down.  We do this all the time when we want to change the sequence of the PTA events.  No need at all to go into Log Tools.   

We use the 'move it' trick to recue the audio, I have also noticed if the audio is out of a 'delayed cue' catagory, we can replace it at the last minute - however the EOM info is NOT replaced. This makes sense when the audio length doesn't change, but can bite us if I'm replacing a shorter newscast with a longer one. The result is my NEW audio airs with the OLD audio EOM info, cutting off the end. - again, not a problem if the cut length doesn't change.

[ChiefOperator]

Wow!  Glad it's fixed.  I would have never guessed that the files could become so defragmented to cause problems in such a short time.  We defrag our iMediatouch 2 or 3 times each week -- never a problem.  But, then again, our configuration is different from yours. 

Yes, Diskeeper should do the job nicely.  We use it on our Logger machine.

[audiophile.]

I defrag about once a year and I never have problems with audio on other automaton systems.

If your hard drive gets more than 80% full you will fragment like crazy, I but I never had any audio problems even then...