Traktor keeps crashing and I have an important gig coming up :(

[funke]

Hey all. I use an audio 10 with 2.5 on 4gig ram vista machine. A few months back I wiped the hard drive and upgraded from traktor pro 1. I set the display settings to performance and system to run in background, as well as deactivating wifi. If I have a track playing and drop in a new track, the cpu overloads from scanning the track and traktor freezes or the whole computer just shuts down.

Last weekend I was playing at a friends party and after loading an unscanned track, my computer froze and I had to restart it. When I opened traktor, all my folders were now red with X's through them and the tracks were missing. I backed traktor up a few weeks ago, so I imagine they should still be in a file somewhere.

A friend and I are trying to create an electronic music scene in our area and on the 27th we are renting out the local community center and have hired a pro sound guy to bring a stack of speakers so we can blast these kids with bass. Only problem is my friend will be running his outputs into deck c and our mic into deck d and I am worried that strain of running four decks will kill my computer and cause a long period of silence.

Anyone have any ideas on what I need to do to keep things running smoothly and get my folders back?

[funke]

I also have key lock disabled and multicore support disabled.

[ksandvik]

Something post-vista like Windows 7? Get a totally wiped out new disk partition, install Windows 7 and just the drivers you need + Traktor. If you use Traktor 2.5, the key lock mode has performance issues so just roll back to 2.1.3.

If still problems, most likely you have a laptop that does not have enough CPU power to handle Traktor -- but that has to be a really old laptop.

[dj matt blaze]

I think your problem is Vista. The red X through everything means that traktor couldn't locate the tracks, they still exist, just have to do a consistency check and relocate. I would also consider picking up a soundboard. You don't have to spend a lot of money, somethinhg simple for like $200 or less. You won't have to run a mic through a deck.

[funke]

I got this computer right before 7 came out, so I just missed out on that. It worked fine in the past. I plan on getting a midifighter 3d for sample deck control, so I don't want to roll back. Getting a new computer before the 27th is highly improbable because of financial reasons and I don't have time to research computers at the moment. I don't really want to spend the money on an update because the display on my Asus X83VB-X2 is bad and it is two and a half years old. It hasn't been a problem because I have a monitor set at a 45° angle on a laptop stand in front of my controllers.

We were planning on running his soundcard and the mic into my card because we have an X1 plugged into my computer that we use for effects on the mic and his soundcard output for the simplicity of not having to bring my booth style mixer. The mixer does make sense on a reliability standpoint and may be a must if I cannot make things stable. I'm going to try and analyze my tracks as well as enable the multicore suport to see if that makes a difference.

[funke]

Normally the cpu runs at the halfway mark, but if I load a track that has not yet been analyzed, the cpu will spike and everything will freeze as soon as it starts to analyze it. It has a dual core Centrino processor rated above 2Ghz.

[ksandvik]

Normally the cpu runs at the halfway mark, but if I load a track that has not yet been analyzed, the cpu will spike and everything will freeze as soon as it starts to analyze it. It has a dual core Centrino processor rated above 2Ghz.

I'm no Windows expert (banned all windows systems in our house 12+ years ago when I spent most of evenings removing spam servers from systems) but I suspect a faulty or badly behaving hard disk myself. The analyze section reads a lot of bytes from the disk in a very short time and if the file system or disk is bad, then there's a lot of bad sectors the CPU has to sort through...

[funke]

It has five usb slots and each one is filled. Could it be taxing on the cpu if I have three controllers, an audio10, and a usb powered minidsp connected? Do I need a powered usb hub?

[dj subculture]

Hey all. I use an audio 10 with 2.5 on 4gig ram vista machine...

That is you main problem. Window Vista is terrible for audio. If you can, upgrade to Win7.
If not, at least optimize your Vista machine for audio use.

Windows Vista Tuning Tips for Audio Processing

[dj matt blaze]

Enabling multicore will make things worse....I would bring your latency up and I would disable everything, not just turning the wifi off but going into the device manager and disabling everything that is not needed, the network adapters, internal soundcard, all of that. Optimize as best you can. Also download this DPCLAT checker http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml the red spikes means something is using too much of the CPU, you just have to figure out what it is. Do it whilr Traktor is not running because Traktor will make it spike.