Karaoke Forums

I have a HP dv7-1232 laptop and my music will keep cutting out. At first I thought I had a bad channel in my mixer and had my speakers & amp gone through to make sure it wasn't them. Bought a new mixer and songs were still cutting out. That is when I realized it was my laptop. Running sax & dotty with WD external hard drive. Any help would be appreciated. Thx in advance.

There are many things to dod but first go into display props and switch to classic view. With Sax playing Cntrl Alt Delete. What is the CPU Usage? How many processes running ?

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

how are you hooking up to the mixer? the audio connection (1/8" connection) may be faulty. Many people use a usb connection!

It could be a bad sound card. Another thing is memory. I checked the specs on your laptop, and it seems that you have plenty of memory. However, if you have a few bad memory chips, it could be affecting how it runs. When you don't have enough working memory, music will cut out when the computer is trying to do other processes, like virus scans, looking up other songs, anything. I also read a review on your laptop, and someone stated that after running a while it was hot and needed to be put on a cooling pad. Is it doing this all the time or only after it's been running a while? If the computer is running hot, cooling pads are not necessarily the answer. Usually, they just need to be cleaned out. This is simply done with an air can. My mom's laptop has to be cleaned out every couple of months or it starts getting hot. Processes start taking forever, and music files run crappy. Laptops are notorious for running hot. It sounds like a problem with your components somewhere. Some sound and video cards also have updated drivers available online. You should check and see if there are any updates to your drivers. Could be many reasons...hard to tell. Have you had a repair company look at it?

Sometimes laptops are hard to service yourself. For one thing, the sound cards and video cards are on the motherboard. If they are faulty, the motherboard has to be replaced, which can be a ridiculous service charge, not to mention being out a laptop for several days. I say all the time, desktops are easier. You can pop one component out and put another one in to test it. They also don't have the problem of running hot after a while.

I don't know how S&D works, if it reads the whole song file into a buffer, or if the OS will do so for it when it's playing from an external drive. If you are playing .ZIP files this should not matter. Does it happen on .ZIP files, or only on .CDG+.MP3 files? The reason I ask, is maybe the hard drive is powering down due to inactivity, and then taking time to spin back up.

I have an old Seagate drive that does this, and sometimes I have to press the power button a few times to coax it into working again, and get Windows to recognize it again. I just bought a new hard drive last week because I am worried it will stop working soon.

_________________
Jeff Wheeler, moonlight DJ/KJ

Thanks for all the feedback, I think I am going to take my laptop back to Staples and see what they can figure out. I did purchase the extended warrenty for a reason. One of my friends it could be the Sax & Dotty program itself that is causing this, possibly a glitch. Would anyone know if this could be it. Thanks.

I don't think it is Sax N Dotty,Sax N dotty uses winamp to play the music and a plugin to display the lyrics...Winamp is a rock solid program.

As suggested above I would look to see what other processes (programs) are running at the time. Turn all wireless devices (WLAN) off. Disable any anti virus programs running...etc. etc. Make sure your external HD is plugged in directly to the laptop and not through a hub.
Your laptop should be set up and optimized for audio playback. I don't have the link handy but Karyoker has posted it several times in the past...you could pm him for the link. It used to be free, but now I think they want a small membership fee.
I saved all of the optimization tips in a word.doc, just can find it at the moment, if I do I will send it to you.
I doubt that Staples will have any clue as to what is going on...sorry to tell you that.

_________________
Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

Audio tuning tips: different than the one posted by Karyoker in the past but covers the same tips.

for XP -->
http://www.native-instruments.com/knowl ... processing

for Vista --> http://www.native-instruments.com/knowl ... processing

_________________
Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.