Karaoke Forums

Hello,
My name is Anthony and I am a newbie to this forum. I would be very grateful for some technical assistance.

I have been doing karaoke shows for about two years. I started off with CD+G discs, a TV and a twin deck etc but a couple of months ago I was at another guys show who was using a laptop etc. Suitably impressed I undertook to build computer based set up for myself.

To cut a very long story of trial and error short, I have a good little system now but have one outstanding issue that is driving me nuts.

Basically, I use Virtual DJ on a Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop which goes to the mixer through a Behringer USB interface. My songs are stored on a 1.5TB external drive
and my lyrics are displayed on a small Dell external monitor connected by VGA cable. To get to this point has taken a lot of troubleshooting etc.

The issue I have is that, when I enable the lyrics on the external monitor it slows the computer down dreadfully. When I am searching for the next singers chosen song, the delay is embarrassing and I am waiting so long for songs to load it's causing me all sorts of problems. When things get busy I get stressed out trying to keep everyone happy.

Has anyone else encountered this? Is is something I am doing wrong with screen resolutions etc. Is there an external video card type thingy that will take the pressure off the computer (in the same way that the usb interface works with the audio. Sorry, I'm not very technical)
or is there another dj program that does not have this problem?.

When I was using discs, with one of the gigs I had in a pub, I was connected to several TVs and this worked out brilliantly. I don't know how to do this with the computer (particularly, when connecting even one monitor nearly crashes everything.) Ideally, I'd like to have the Laptop screen, the external monitor and a TV connected. Is this possible?

I'd be really grateful if you guys might suggest a way of overcoming this issue before I tear out what little hair I have left.

Thanks a lot for your help

Anthony

Odd. Download and install the latest video driver from here....

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_no ... _beta.html

Your laptop has a duo core processor @ 2 gHz, plenty of memory. You should be able to run karaoke with no problem.

Somewhere, you are losing memory to a competing program, probably something in the background.

Some suggestions to get that memory back:

1) Turn off all non-essential background programs, including network connectivity and anti-virus software. These are reasource hogs.

2) BIGGIE! Turn off the Microsoft Indexing Service. Another big resource hog.

From My Computer > right-click on the C: Drive > select Properties.
Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching." Apply changes to "C: sub folders and files," and click OK.

Repeat the above procedure for ALL attached drives, both internal and external.

Just turning off these three background programs will free up 50% of your system's memory, which can then be devoted to your video display!

_________________
C Mc
KJ, FL

I use Virtual DJ on an Intel Celeron M 1.4Ghz Compaq laptop with 512MB RAM, and use (depending on the venue) the external VGA or the SVideo out signal and it's smooth as slik.

I also use a Beheringer USB interface and external hard drive.. although, my external drives are only 320GB drives, and they're not nearly half full.

You must have one heck of a music collection to need 1.5TB.

So Virtual DJ should be screamin' fast on a dual core laptop.

First thing i'd check would be in the 'Config' section, click on the 'Video' tab and make sure the 'use hardware acceleration' box is checked.

Second thing would be to keep an eye on your CPU monitor.. that's the green bar at the top. If that thing is anything above say, 1/4 you probably have some background processes running that are bogging down your system.

For instance, at idle, my Virtual DJ CPU meter sits at like 1 little tiny bar.

One common misconception is that the new computers are better. Sure their CPU's are faster, dual core, etc.. but if you put a hog of an operating system on them, they don't run any faster than an older computer using XP.

In fact, many times, they run quite a bit slower.

An area KJ i'm friends with recently bought a brand new HP dual core laptop running windows 7.. he's got 2GB of RAM.. Virtual DJ runs chuggy as hell, and his CPU meter is at like 50% at idle.

So while his hardware might be faster than mine, the hardware is taxed three times as much running Windows 7.

Kind of like a race car with a trailer full of bricks thrown on it vs. a Yugo in a 1/4 mile race.

The race car has a good majority of its power used up pulling all the extra weight, so the Yugo ends up taking the checkered flag.

First things first - the resolution of the video on CDG's is low. VERY low. IIRC, it's 320x200. Broadcast NTSC TV is about 400 lines of resolution so 640x400 is a good choice.

That means, take that external monitor and drop the resolution to 640x400, or as low as it will go, and try it again. Also, reduce the number of colors. CDG is only 16 colors. Most computers won't drop anywhere near that low - but reduce it as much as you can.

More oft than not, it's the video subsystem that's being bogged down more so than anything else. Especially if the 'slow down' happens when you fire up the second screen.

I'm wondering if the problem might be your external storage device.

Try putting a bunch of your songs in a folder on your internal drive then disconnect the external.

Fire up your system, make sure you change any automatic drive routing you might have to match the location on your internal drive that you moved the songs to.

Now try to simulate a normal operating situation and see if you encounter the same problem. If you don't then something to do with your external storage device is the problem.

If that's the case it could be a few things:

1) The drive is faulty
2) The device drivers for the drive are causing some sort of i/o bottleneck
3) Ditto your laptop's USB drivers

Even if there's nothing wrong, 1.5 TB is a lot of storage. The more storage you use the more processor 'overhead' you create for seek/access operations, etc. This effect is increased since using external storage essentially adds an additional software driver to the process and things like memory and processor use tend to increase exponentially when you add more stuff to the chain.

Hope that helped.

Cheers,
Mark_E_DeCarabas

I would like to thank you all for your suggestions. I admit I'm not technically minded.
Your help is much appreciated and I am going through all of your suggestions.
Tim, on investigation, there seems to be an Intel 945gm Chipset installed not nvidia but I take onboard the suggestion.
I have tried updating the driver for that but it says I have the latest. I will try and get advice on whether to upgrade my video card but I really would need advice on that as to whether it would help.
TopherM, I have disabled the anti virus, the microsoft indexing service and and network connectivity. These are great suggestions which will probably help overall but unfortunately the main problem remains.
theCheese, I have checked the Virtual Dj config section and the hardware accelerator is enabled. Very good advice though as I never really noticed the CPU bar before. My laptop is used only for karaoke as I always assumed un-necessary programs and documents would slow it down. My laptop uses XP (I never took to Vista or 7 as I found them quite fiddly). On using Virtual DJ I checked the CPU bar as you suggested. The usage bar is at 1 when running the program just on the laptop, when I open the karaoke graphics on the monitor this jumps to 75% and the slowness problem starts. I probably made a mistake buying the 1.5TB drive. A couple of months ago when all of this started, I thought my previous drive (250GB) being close to full might contribute to the problem. Probably not true on reflection.
Karaokemeister, another good suggestion. On checking this though, I find that the resolution is already set to 640x400 and that is the lowest it will go.
Mark, again good suggestion. I've tried temporarily putting the music files onto the laptop itself and disconnecting the external drive but unfortunately no luck. I take onboard what you say about the external drive being very large but as I mention above I mistakenly thought that this might rather than hinder.
Thanks again guys for all of your help. The more I think about all of this, the more I think I am doing something dumb and that the answer is staring me in the face.
Virtual DJ is literally the only program on the laptop. There are no documents stored on it either. I've started checking the task manager while Virtual DJ is running. There are no significant processes running in the background and yet the CPU usage graph is up at 50% and above most of the time. I'm mystified!
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Thanks again.

Regards
Anthony

So did it EVER work smoothly? Or is this a problem that developed after some time?

If hardware acceleration is enabled, but you see the CPU usage spike significantly when you send video to the second monitor and you're running XP.. you may want to check the following:

1. With video cards that 'share' system memory, check to make sure at least 16 megs of ram are reserved for the video card. You can usually do this in your computers 'Setup' screen.

When you first turn your computer on, you may see something that says 'Press F1 for Setup..' or words to that effect. Caution: the BIOS isn't the place to really be dinking around if you're not familiar with settings.

2. Make sure the driver you have installed for your video card IS THE CORRECT DRIVER.

Go to the manufacturers website and download the most recent driver for your laptops model number, and then remove the current driver and install the one you just downloaded.

Your best bet is probably going to be to take it to a local computer shop and have them take a look at it. Explain the issues your having, and let them do their thing.

Doubt it's the video card, I have a pretty equivalent HP laptop with the Intel graphics & it works fine. I would agree make sure all your drivers & updates are current for the entire computer in general, might need updates from Microsoft as well.
As far as hooking it up to other tv's you just need to get a video splitter, I actually run my S-Video out to an RF Modulator to a signal splitter to all the house tv's and singer screen like I did with players.

_________________
LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I can't see it being the video card either.
Download Filemon and see what your system is doing.
Just google anything you don't know.

http://download.cnet.com/Filemon/3000-2 ... 20837.html

If I had to guess, there is some CPU throttling going on....

It's a long shot in the dark, but here's a few things to try:

1. Make sure you're in 'high performance' mode. It's under power options in the control panel.

2. Make sure you have any cpu throttling turned off. Here's a link to an article on M-Audio's website about the subject:
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=sup ... d44dd9078f

3. Turn off the power management for the USB ports. Go into device manager (right click 'My Computer', select 'Manage', and then device manager) and then click on each USB hub and bring up the properties by right clicking. Under power management you'll see an option to turn off this device to save power. TURN IT OFF so that it does NOT turn off to save power. This is a common problem where USB devices are put to sleep and seem to disconnect and re-connect. It may not be associated with your problem, but it never hurts to try.

4. While your problem isn't associated with latency (clicking and popping in the audio stream) - running the DPC latency checker might be able to help you find problems.
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml


And one more thing - when the processor jumps to 75% look in the task manager to see what process is using all that processing power. If it's NOT Virtual DJ there is DEFINITELY a problem (of course, that could be a problem with virtual DJ).

Whoops... one more.... check to make sure you have the latest release of Virtual DJ you can load on your machine. There could be a minor update that fixes some issues you're having.

Did you use FileMon.
If you don't comprehend, post a log.
There are many here that would help.

Thanks for all of the help guys, I really appreciate it. To update the situation, I was doing the final of a karaoke competition on Sunday night and on setting up the machine froze solid. I am now assuming that there was a virus on there somewhere. I tried to reboot but nothing would happen so I plugged it out and removed the battery to try and restart it that way but the screen came up blue. I am no computer expert but even I know that's not good.
I was very lucky that this happened at the start of the night and that I was at least able to borrow a friends laptop to finish the show to some degree.

I'm going hand the laptop into a repairman and get it completely reloaded. I'm really fed up with whole thing and hope that the machine will be stable when it's rebuilt.
Thanks again.

Regards

Anthony

Hmmm.
BSOD?

Sounds more like hardware.

Don't pay someone to reload your PC. All you need to do it turn it on, and press Ctrl + F11, while it's on the power on self test screen (the first screen it shows when it turns on). It will then proceed to do a factory restore, automatically. Should save you a hundred bucks or more.

Depends how your fixed financially.
Tim is right.
We could all help you through it.

The BSOD we could overcome if you have more than 1 stick of mem
Oh yes. The HD may be unhappy.
Sys restore is without a paddle.