midi

It would be useful to know the specs of your computer (processor, memory, sound card, hard drive size and available space - that sorta thing), which operating system and which browser you're using, and what software is giving you the difficulty. Dunno as I'm gonna be able to be of much help, but mebbe, given enough info, somebody can.

ok i'll try. i think my processor is an AMD duron processor about 850MHz. and i think my sound thing is SiS 7018 Audio Driver. i have 448.0MB of ram. i have two hard drives, one using about 3/4 GB another about 20/80 GB. i'm using win98, and internet explorer browser. no software in specific gives problems, any that tries to play a midi.

What device do you use for MIDI-music playback? You can check this at Control panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices -> Audio or something like that. May be slightly different in Windows 98. If possible, change the device to something else than its current settings and see if the problem persists. Even if you won't hear anything when playing MIDI-files after having changed it, you could at least see if it still locks up the computer (provided there are any other options to choose of course). If it's a cheap built-in audio device on a motherboard, chances are its MIDI-features will be very limited.

Hmmmmm .... I got a suspicion your machine just might not be up to it, specially if you have much in the way of background tasks going on, or are trying to listen to midi files with other applications running. You have integrated audio, not a sound card, and I'm gonna suspect integrated vidseo as well, which both use system memory and processor resources, as opposed to having their own. It could be a resources issue. I could be wrong - thats just a guess.

I think it odd, though; one of my machines is a PIII 600, with 384MB of RAM, Win 98SE, and only a single 20GB hard drive, about 1/3 full mosta the time (mostly just the operating system and programs on the internal hard drive - output generally goes to an external drive), which plays midi fine - though it does have a pretty sophisticated 5.1 soundcard and a 64MB video card - as long as the machine isn't really crunching away at something else - its not real good at multi-tasking. If too much gets to be going on, it stutters, and once in a while locks up. About all I ever use it for IS[/i] audio stuff; its the machine I use most often for recording and manipulating audio, analog or CD - in fact, the machine has both a turntable and a cassette player hooked up to it, as well as its own internal, late-model, high-speed CD-RW drive and an older, but quite adequate internal DVD ROM. While I prefer uncompressed audio, and rarely use MP3 or other compressed formats, it does fine with those too, including midi. I'd think your machine oughtta be able to do so too.

Still, I can manage to lock up a 3.4GHz P 4, with a pretty high-end motherboard, 2GB of RDRAM, a pair of 10,000 RPM 75 GB hard drives in RAID-0 configuration, a pair of 256MB AGP 8X video cards, a high-end 7.1 sound card which occupies a full drive bay, a pair of internal multi-format, dual-layer burners, a pair of big, fast Firewire 800 external drives, a high-def TV tuner card, dual GigaByte EtherNet, Wireless A/B/G, and Win XP Pro, too (oh, and you betchya its huge, it has a real beefy power supply and a lotta fans, too :wink: - damned near capable of heating a small room when its working hard ) Its great at multi-tasking, real good at all sorts of complex graphics and video, super for gaming, in fact its overkill for most things, but even it will do only so much. Don't let anybody tell you the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) is a thing of the past with WinXP and modern hardware; I'm real familiar with it

How much stuff do you have loading at startup? Are there a lot of icons in your system tray, down there by your clock at the bottom right of your screen?

as to what i run on startup. basically, as little as possible. i try to make sure i'm not running too much things..
i've been trying to change the settings, like using different midi output settings.. some seem better than others, and seem to make the midi a lot more reliable, but using them it often seems to start making the other sound file types unreliable (like mp3s) but not locking up my computer, just meaning i can't listen to music through windows media player or things like that until i restart.
do you people think i should upgrade my hardware? like get some kind of sound card?

Yes. I would recommend that you get a cheap internal PCI sound card, like a Sound Blaster Audigy 1 or 2, or SB Live! or similar. They are vastly superior to those integrated thingies that ship with motherboards, and you can probably get one for less than $50.

I agree a dedicated soundcard will go a long way toward resolving that issue. Actually, you should be able to find plenty that will do a fine job from around US $20 on up - basic-but-adequate soundcards are cheap. Killer soiundcards aren't, but few folks need, let alone can take advantage of, a killer soundcard; to really do one justice, your computer's soundsystem would have to be on the order of a fairly respectable multi-hundred-watt, multi-channel home theater rig, with a complete matched array of full-sized/full spectrum audiophile grade speakers and a hefty independently powered subwoofer.


'Course, if you do go that way, you can get hella good sound out of a 'puter - good enough to glaringly expose the flaws and shortcomings of MP3 and the like. I hate compressed music.


(though if carefully recorded, ogg-vorbis comes pretty close to being not too bad)

If you listen a lot to music and have your computer connected to an amp with nice speakers, I would recommend that you spend a few extra dollars and get for example a Soundblaster Audigy 2. They provide much better sound quality than your average $20 no name card and have very impressive signal to noise ratios (you can turn the speaker volume up a lot without hearing any noise whatsoever). They also have 24-bit support, up to 192kHz, unlike most cheap cards which usually can't handle anything over 48kHz and 16 bits. The Audigy 2 range of cards starts at around $60, and even the cheapest varieties are perfectly ok.

From my perspective and experience, you aren't gonna find a better consumer soundcard than the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro - but I'll emphasize again, not many folks have either the need for nor capability to exploit what that card (and separate breakout module) can do.