The track that ruined my set

[alien2k]

Guys and Girls,

I wanted to share this saturday night experience with you all, specially for Traktor users, hopefully this helps prevent some issues for you all when performing.

Well I was asked by a good friend to play at his B day party, so Saturday afternoon I wasted my preparation time in buying new tracks (got carried away with beatport) and rippin 1 cd from which I wanted to use one specific track (wont say the name but it cost me my set). I did not prepare my playlists nor my laptop before the gig, as I usualy do.... I have been playing on clubs a lot lately so I just took a ¨light approach¨ to this gig this time as I was going to be performing for friends at a house party...

So when I arrived at my friends house and started my system (by the way, i use Windows XP SP2, purchased version of Tracktor 3.4, vci 100, firewire M-audio interface ), I noticed that Traktor was taking too long to boot up.... as a matter of fact I restarted my laptop, because I felt something was wrong....
Again Traktor took a long time to boot up but eventually it got loaded and working, so I started doing my job. I satrted playing at 10:50 PM.
Around 2:00 am when everybody was having a blast, and my set was on fire including myself the worst thing happened... while I was browsing around my playlists I got a error message that stated somthing as:
"Traktor has encountered an error and will shut down, an error log has been created in .... blah blah..." But the song keep playing, but the screen was frozen, so I had 1 minute before the track was over to do something

So i cued up an awefull cd (my fault not to be prepared this time) that was on standby on a cd deck and just played that song while I restarted my system, which again took a long long time to be up again. Obviusly I killed all the energy and need to pick up again. Also when the other track started I started singing happy birthday together with all the people there,so at the end I solved it without much issues , but if this heppend to me at the club, I would be very very mad....
Then I was very unsecure with the system so I just kept still and didn´t borwse much around... It didn´t fail again until I left at 4:00

So... now the interesting part.. why did it fail?
I have worked on my performing laptop a lot in order to have a bullet proof system, I have optimized services, and OS. Plus I have investigated and tested a lot before being comfortable. And untill now it has NEVER failed. I use XP, because I have lots of knowledge on this sytem and how to troubleshoot it.
So Yesterday I tryed to reproduce and investigated what was happening... a quick visit to the event viewer console revealed the guilty...
For those that have not seen the event viewer, it is a system that keeps log of all the diferent relevant events that happen on the system and they are separated into, Application, security and system events....

At the time the system failed you could see the error message in the application events, which show an application failure and it specifyes the software that failed, in this case Traktor 3.4.

The interesting thing is that at the exact time the software failed you could see another error, now on the system events, which was called CD ROM ERROR... the details stated that the cd inside my laptop had an invalid block, and it generated a system error.

Remeber the cd I ripped to take the track... I never removed from the cd reader on my laptop.... Remember that I mentioned that traktor failed while I was borwsing on Traktor´s browser... It surely activated the cd reading and got the error from the system because of its invalid block and generated a mayor failure in traktor... my system failed.
Remember I mentioned Traktor took too long to boot up... I can imagine that before booting up traktor loads media devices, and as there was an error in the media (cdrom) it tooked long and crashed. So I removed the cd and all the evil was out of my laptop, now traktor only takes a few seconds to boot up... confidence on my system is up again.

Btm line.. a bad cd loaded on the reader can cause traktor to take long to boot up and eventually crash. Bealive me It happened...

Recomendation: Windows users, get to know the event vewer console and chcek for system errors, they can be a potential failure in the future... a healthy system does not show system or application errors. To access it you can go to Start- run - and type: eventvwr . Also you can search it.

Last thing... Traktor´s crashlogs are in a code which makes them useless for users. Need to send it to NI to get a reading.... Or does anybody knows ho to decode the meesage (Karlos?)

[Fatlimey]

That's just about the most useful tip I've heard for weeks.

Not only did you have a "mystery crash", you set about trying to understand why it happened, you diagnosed the fault, and we all can benefit from your efforts.

Excellent post, mate. +1

[djhipnotikk]

did you not copy the song fully? why would it want to go back to the cd if you've ripped it completely off? technology can be hella-weird sometimes :P

[alien2k]

Thanks Fatlimey, the idea is that there are no mystery crash... That is what keeps my head sane and allows me to trust in my laptop instead of my turntables...

djhipnotikk:

I did rip the track completly but when opening the traktor borwser to search for another song it does make a reading on the CD rom bay, so if you want to actually play a song from the cd it is there. I guess the same reading is performed while traktor boots up. Both of those readings were generating issues...

[DvlsAdvct]

Yeah, I had this problem a LONG time ago. There was a CD in the drive and Traktor gave me all sorts of issues til I got it out. Now I never keep audio CDs in my laptop after I rip them.

[midifidler]

Great tip thanks for the info

[Lambox]

Thanks for the tip, bro. Even though I don't use Traktor, I know from other experience that certain CD's can just make your computer dragggggg when specific programs are running.

On an unrelated note, I cannot leave CD's (of any kind) in my laptop when I turn it on, because it tries to boot from the CD, and seems how 99.9% of my CD's aren't boot discs, my computer hangs. (I know I could probably go into my BIOS settings, but I don't care all that much)

I don't know. Thanks for the tip tho.

[jd62]

thx for the insight

[BentoSan]

I never would have thought a cd would do that, learn something new every day !

[Cyrgon]

Nice post!

I have had something similar happen to me with my computer thinking it had a floppy disk reader.. While it in reality didn't, I have no idea how it began thinking it had one in the first place, but that's not the point.

What happened was that when I started Traktor it would look in my non-existent floppy disk for media files (I think..), which in return gave me an error message on every bootup. I promtly made the system realize that it didn't have a floppy and the error messages disappeared after that. This gives the same indication as your problem; that Traktor checks the drives for media on boot, I wonder if there's a way to turn it off?