VCI-100 Crashing laptop.
VCI-100 Crashing laptop. Posted on: 27.07.2009 by Vernon Positano Hi guys,After some troubleshooting and exploration, I have discovered that when my VCI-100 is plugged into my laptop, it will, eventually, cause traktor to become unstable, and either lock up one or both decks. Sometimes, turning off the VCI-100 can restore everything again, other times, traktor needs a full restart. The same happens with playing with virtual DJ, but the result is more spectacular! The whole laptop powers off and shutsdown instantly. Both of these can happen within minutes, or a couple of hours, its really variable. I do know however that without the VCI-100 plugged in, I get no crashes at all, on either software. So I'm guessing its something to do with the USB bus. I've tried changing which socket its plugged into, and used a different cable, but it still crashes all the same. I should also note, that I can have the VCI-100 plugged into a USB port, and if I don't use it, the software works fine. This is leading me to believe that their is a power issue, thats causing a malformed midi message to get through and fubar whatever dj software is listening at the time. Anyone else come across this ? | |
| Vernon Positano 27.07.2009 | Hi guys, After some troubleshooting and exploration, I have discovered that when my VCI-100 is plugged into my laptop, it will, eventually, cause traktor to become unstable, and either lock up one or both decks. Sometimes, turning off the VCI-100 can restore everything again, other times, traktor needs a full restart. The same happens with playing with virtual DJ, but the result is more spectacular! The whole laptop powers off and shutsdown instantly. Both of these can happen within minutes, or a couple of hours, its really variable. I do know however that without the VCI-100 plugged in, I get no crashes at all, on either software. So I'm guessing its something to do with the USB bus. I've tried changing which socket its plugged into, and used a different cable, but it still crashes all the same. I should also note, that I can have the VCI-100 plugged into a USB port, and if I don't use it, the software works fine. This is leading me to believe that their is a power issue, thats causing a malformed midi message to get through and fubar whatever dj software is listening at the time. Anyone else come across this ? |
| Vernon Positano 14.08.2009 | Well, turns out the issue is midi out, and I'm not alone. This thread details it well:- http://www.djranking s.com/community /showthread.php?t=2321 There are also threads on the NI community s too. |
| Vernon Positano 29.07.2009 | Well so far no crashes when either my sound card or vci-100 is powered externally using a 9v DC adapter I have lying around, which suggests that this is easing the power load sufficiently across the USB bus to make things stable. |
| Vernon Positano 27.07.2009 | Tried different ports and different cables, the results are the same, a software or total crash at 'some' time during the evening! Gonna try power adapter first, and will post back results. EDIT: As luck would have it, I have a volt switchable DC adapter spare here, and have been testing it out. So far, so good.. Will post back definitive results in a day or two when I'm happy its been resolved. EDIT: Still no crash! But did discover something interesting. Under the device manager in windows, there are a number of USB root hubs listed. I'm wondering whether internally, my laptop is wired so that certain/all ports share a single output capacity of 500ma. Also... purely out of curiousity, I have been looking up the ma requirements of each of my USB periherals by plugging them into my usb root hub. When I plugged in too many for the laptop to cope with (power wise), traktor locked up immediately, even tho the VCI was externally powered at the time. I believe this is because the lockup is caused by insufficient power going to the soundcard via the USB bus. Furthermore, this crash required me to shutdown traktor via the task manager. This appeared to work successfully, but it required a full reboot to actually get traktor to work again properly (even tho I could for instance, still run say virtual dj). |
| 27.07.2009 | sure sounds like a power draw problem to me as well. I would test the various USB ports to see if the results vary between ports. This might signal a port problem and not a vci-100 issue. |
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