Windows 7 and a long story.

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bahador
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Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

If feasible please take a moment and read this thread. Right now I’m posting this I’m feeling so down because of my recent experiences with the nubuzz on windows 7 Ultimate 64 bits SP-1.

I’ll do my best to write it down a way not to provoke nor give any false assumption to anyone prejudice about Oskari and fellows in the forum and also not to be ungrateful about anyone’s efforts throughout these years (though I never tended to do so but I’ve seen that there are some folks in this forum who are wiling to tear you down for something you have not said or meant but anywayz that’s not the point)

I’ve been using buzz since 1998. Throughout the past 15 years I’ve been running buzz through windows XP for almost 8 or 9 years and truth to be told I think no one got happier than me when Oskari got back and started working on the nubuzz again. It meant the world to most of us that we could have our favorite and most complete tracker back in the progress again.

Being on the XP platform needles to say I could witness the improvements and never wanted to come out of my comfort zone. The day Oskari wrote there won’t be any support for windows XP platform (oh yeah that very lovely day), I thought it is a must for me to try it on the new OS but I saw that still I have no problem running this awesome software on my XP SP3. That being said the limitations of a 32 bit platform forced me to finally make that decision and start working on a new OS to be able to get the most out of my hardware features as well.

But what made buzz more awesome on the new builds (of course only on XP(in my case)) was the feeling of having a stable software, being able to still run buzz if a machine is gone, being sure that you can listen to a song completely as loud as possible without concerning about any unwanted shocking sounds of white noise or the sudden sound of a driller blowing up your monitors all the time, being sure that when you want to connect this machine to the other one there won’t be a low pitched frightening clicking sound, being sure next time you want to open your previous session there won’t be any notification in the start up telling you “buzz has encountered a problem and will close” and last but not least when you click on BUZZ.EXE it will open up itself without the need of going through the compatibility adjustments and stuff and many more.

Along with all these awesome features you found the chance to be able to almost run any plugins out there with the sincerest help of Frank Podolski who made buzz even better with his Polac vst loader and with his professional supportive manner and all the incredible machines and efforts of Joachim.

It was mostly said the strange manners of buzz are being caused by the buggy machines and as soon as you remove them there won’t be a sign of any of the mentioned items. On my recent experiences on win 7-SP1 with the build of 1481, I almost experienced all of the things that I thought were gone forever even without using any buggy machine from buzz.

I could hear all sorts of shocking noises and sounds, driller sounds, the clicking sounds of connecting a machine to another, BUZZ has encountered a problem and closes (and doesn’t open that session AT ALL), buzz.exe didn’t open up!, when a machine is gone buzz won’t load the song at all and closes it down. And guys it was not buggy machines, they were all famous plugins out there which maybe are not compatible with buzz. I almost thought I’m on the old buzz. And you can not imagine how shocking it is to experience something like that after 8 years again.

I could manage to drop one of the issues (the loud clicking sound of connecting a machine to another) by changing the compatibility to windows XP but the rest remained as strong as they were just like on the first buzz 1.5

I think it has been more than 17 years that oskari is working on buzz. Parallel to buzz there were rebirth, modplug, renoise and a bunch of other trackers and modulators and as I’ve seen and worked with most of them in the past I have no doubt that none of them had strong programmers equal to Oskari, Joachim, Frank, Oleg, Marc, Carsten and most of other people who were with buzz since the beginning. The experiences that you guys have achieved throughout the years of working on buzz are priceless and buzz can still be the best out there not only for us who are using it but for those who are working with reaper, renoise, reason, fl studio.

I hope we get some other conclusions of this long passage other than “when you are not paying you don’t have the right to talk about it” but doesn’t matter if you are getting that impression out of this thread, okay just consider this as if a fan was thinking out loud about his dreams for buzz.

I just reported some errors in a long story (big companies hire people to work on their alpha and beta releases to report bugs and issues) just consider me one of those fellows who were reporting the errors he got out of working on the beta release of a software. If anyone was willing to work on them, I’ll be most pleased to give back more details on the errors I’m getting.

Again, thank you so very much for all of the efforts and hard works you have put through for buzz and like everyone in this forum I’m so grateful of them all and my best interest is to be of a help to make buzz the best of the best. Thanks for your consideration of this matter. Attached please find the spec of my system.

OS: Windows 7–64bits Ultimate edition (SP1)
SoundCard: M-Audio Profire 610 (installed through a firewire connection)
Buzz: 1481
CPU: Intel 3770K
Memory: 8Gb
MoBo: Intel dz77-re 75k

-----------------------------------ADDED-------------------------------------------------

I forgot to mention I also experienced a new issue, when I open a project and do some editing when willing to saving the project, buzz crashes and closes and doesn't even let me save the file! none of the saving options are working (Save) and (Save As)... they both crash buzz and close it down.
Last edited by bahador on Sat May 25, 2013 12:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
mute
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by mute »

To put it bluntly -

The problem isn't Windows 7. Buzz is developed on Windows 7 and the .NET platform. Windows 7 is its native OS. Your experience is an anomaly, not the norm. Congrats on finally moving to a far superior OS ;)

Your problems are going to be mostly silly things (no offense meant by that) & honestly, no one is going to want to remotely untangle your mess for you.

So, I'd suggest -

1) uninstall Buzz completely
2) back up your machine and theme directories.
3) read the existing thread on black listed machines
4) figure out your audio driver/card/configuration/whatever problem, that has nothing to do with buzz (except maybe in relation to step 5/step 8)
5) install Buzz cleanly, not to a preexisting Buzz directory.
6) use this opportunity to rid yourself of garbage that shouldn't be in your install anymore
7) make sure you have needed runtimes for some old machines, i.e. go get the fixit kit from BM by Apo
8) don't dump all the garbage from your current Buzz\ dir into your new Buzz\ installation, the old world of Buzz on XP and old Buzz on XP, etc. was a work of shitty hacks, needless runtimes, horribly registry management, and all kinds of ugly issues. You don't want all the old waveoutdriver crap, you don't want all the old PVST crap, you don't want any of that stuff. What you want is to delete it, ignore it, or forget you had it at all, and redownload PVST and install both Buzz and PVST and PVST ASIO (if you use that) from scratch. This is what I meant by CLEAN in step 5. No old Buzz crap laying around. All of these core items have changed & improved drastically; waveout, pvst, pvst asio, pvst midi, & buzz. You don't want old stuff laying around and f'ing it up or causing confusion by having incorrect and outmoded machines or other files in your Buzz install.

Even though you are on a 64bit OS, run the 32bit version of Buzz. the 64bit build is experimental and will explode all over the place. It's only there for download for people who want to help advance the 64bit version by finding issues and helping to resolve them.

Starting small is always easier, and unlike the mess of Buzz on XP.. once you've figured out your problems that are causing problems with Buzz on the OS it's meant to be run on, you'll never have to do it again because it doesn't rely or need any of the old hacky broken junk we used to rely on. You've got to purge your demons.
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UNZ
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by UNZ »

bahador wrote: changing the compatibility to windows XP
DON'T do this! it will cause more problems than it solves.

Also, i hope you are using the 32bit version and NOT the 64bit version.

Also i recommend you use Polac ASIO instead of MME.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Mute and Antonio thank you so much for the quick responses (felt like the old buzzhurch where everyone was active).

Mute: if we get to the point that my problem (I tend to call it issue) is our problem then we can make some progress. Cuz if there’s no one willing to untangle my mess and our messes in general, how we can claim we fix all the bugs. I mean that’s the physics and nature of reporting issues and not caring about it will just pin us to the point we’re already at. So as you are the moderator I beg you to care about other’s issues and help them fix it if you might. Like the one you just did for and I’m most appreciative of it.

1. I’ve already done it couple of times so far
2. I don’t use themes and I don’t have a bulky trunk of buzz machines (answering item 2 and 5) so everything is fresh all the way from the scratch.
3. I couldn’t find the threat I did search for black listed machines and I couldn’t find it, if you might please give me the address.
4. I have downloaded the latest audio driver for my sound card for the win 7 64bit SP1 and I just installed it without messing around with the control panel so it is all set to default settings.
5. I’ve never installed buzz on the previously installed folder and when uninstalling buzz I have the tendency to delete the registry keys, strings and folders as well.
6. as mentioned there are a few buzz machines installed in my gear folder
7. I could only open some of the previous projects (which they also were produced using the new popular vst plugins) through using fixkit.
8. and again everything was installed as a fresh install nothing was copy pasted form the old backup files.

So if you will give me more instructions to get rid of the existing problems.

Antonio,

If I switch back to the compatibly setting where it was I’ll hear more white noise and clicking sounds but I’ll put it back to the default compatibility settings as you’ve suggested.

No I have never installed the 64bits version as it is written on jeskola.net to stick to the 32 bits version.

Basically asio drivers take whole a lot of cpu so I need to stick to a waveform driver to hear the stuff which are being played back but again I’ll switch it back to Polac Asio as you’ve suggested. But as mentioned I’ve already tested all drivers, installing procedures and not using the buggy machines. Oh btw I think I downloaded the recommended pack from BM from the link. So basically everything I got there in my gears is from the recommended pack on BM. Is there any black listed machine in that pack?

Thanks again.
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Joachip
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Reducing noise bursts

Post by Joachip »

Here's the two things I do to not get "hit by the power drill", aka. the noise bursts:

1) Get rid of the faulty machines causing these. Buzz does not do noise bursts. Only the plug-ins do. I'm completely convinced of this.

2) If you still fear your might get them, make sure you're working rather close to the maximum output level of Buzz. That will make the difference between the music and the noise burst smaller, and thus you won't get such a big shock if it happens.

This image should show my point. First you see someone working at a very low audio level and getting a noise burst. As you can see, the burst is much louder than the music. In the second half the music is quite loud - and because of this, the noise burst is only a bit louder than the music.

Image

This is no perfect solution, of course, and you still need to to go step 1) for a proper solution.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Hi Joachim thanks for your comment.

1. I’ll consider it as a fact if you say it isn’t buzz fault for producing the noise burst and will look for the other stuff causing this error. But like I said the plugins are IK Multimedia T-rackS 3, Waves Mercury Bundle, some Native instruments. I just downloaded the recommended pack from buzz machines could there be any black listed machine in that pack?
2. Sure thing but the point is for doing that I need to maximize the level and that way I’ll loose the sense of the right mix for the tracks but as you’ve mentioned it makes the shocking part less painful.

Please let me know if there could be a black listed machine in the pack.
Thank you so much again for your comment brother.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

The song that buzz didn't allow me to save had these machines in it. and basically these are the machines I use in buzz.

0. Mtrk 2 & 3
1. EQ-7
2. EQ-10
3. HD Bguitar
4. Joachim's PowerPan
5. Cyanpahse Stereo Meld
6. Larsha FunkyVerb
7. SonicVerb
8. FSM Chorus
9. Firrsledge Param EQ
10. KickXp
11. 909
11. 808
12. Joachim Battlecomp
13. Jeskola, Ninja and X-Delay
14. Cheapo Amp Fixer Pro

That's pretty much all I can recall of.
Last edited by bahador on Sat May 25, 2013 1:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Joachip
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by Joachip »

Some of those I don't even know, but I'm pretty sure I've had noise bursts with EQ-7 and EQ-10. These machines also don't sound very good. I suggest you use FireSledge ParamEQ or BigYO EQ instead.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

I guess it's EQ-7 and EQ-10 then, I'll try to remove them tonight and update this post if the issue was solved. i wrote fms param EQ isntead of Firesledge, yeah indeed it is an awesome parametric EQ. and yes those two EQs doesn't sound good at all and for a song I had to import a bassline chain which was EQed through these two.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Joachim I removed the EQ-10 and HD Bguitar from the song and it finally allowed me to Save the song. but what I can not understand about the coding part of buzz is, how can a buggy machine mess with the whole system of buzz? I mean shouldn't there be some preventing rules or codes to ignore buggy stuff that are imported in buzz?

like if a buggy machine has the potentials to mess with the whole platform, shut it down and ignore the output of that machine for instance. this way that machine won't find the chance to bring the whole session down.

like in the past if a machine was not available in your gear folder the song wouldn't open at all giving you the notification that the machine is not available and then close it down! well finally Oskari fixed that issue and now buzz runs perfectly if a machine is gone (in xp of course) and there was this sign on the machine 'missing' which I don't see that sign in windows 7 as well. so couldn't he make it possible by incorporating the additional codes for buzz to completely ignore the output of a corrupted chain of machines like that and still allow the session to go on without any noise burst or output damage?
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UNZ
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by UNZ »

if there was a way to magically fix all buggy code by inserting some more magic code, then there would be no bugs in software ;)

this is just not how it works, especially on the native side where a write to the wrong memory location can cause havok all over.
(or in EQ7/10 case not even initializing memory properly i suspect)

also sometimes you might just not want to sacrifice your nice design to accomodate obviously buggy code which should never run in the first place.
if buzz checked for every possible coding error made by machine developers (nevermind that this isn't possible anyway), it would be a lot slower and 99% of machines would probably fail to run in the first place.
And of course there are basic (and even not so basic) sanity checks, but there's a limit in how much you are willing to whipe the asses of sloppy developers/code.

with those old buggy buzz machines that manage to fuck up a bmx or similar horrible things its really a no brainer: everyone should delete them and move on.
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MarC
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by MarC »

Hello. Thanks for the credit (was I involved with Buzz development?? I can't remember) - I was here from quite near the start of Buzz and have been using ever since as my primary music creation program.

Anyway, the reason for my rather random out-of-the-blue response is because I saw a machine in your list that I remembered having problems with. I had noise bursts, similar to how you describe.

The machine was SonicVerb. I got rid of SonicVerb from my song and replaced all instances of it with HD-verb (halyverb, maybe?) - and the noise bursts went away.

It may help, it may not. I hope it does :)
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UNZ
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by UNZ »

yes, delete sverb.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Hey Marc nice to have you here on your second post buddy. It was my bad then well you've been with the team since the beginning and you've mentioned and since most of these fellows here are incredible programmers I thought you were on the same boat but hey let's say you were on the web-related end. truth to be told using sverb was a no brainer for me but of course I'll drop that out of my list right away and thanks a whole lot for mentioning it. appreciate it.

Joachim being able to save that project was just a short phase and again I'm not able to make it. every time I press save button it gives me a note that "Buzz has stopped working" and close it down. I will attach a screen shot of the session and just in case I removed any KFlager, EQ-10, HD Bguitar but still not able to save the project. (is there any way or special software that can help to find out what is bugging buzz?)

Antonio: For sure I'm not looking for any kind of magic and like I said in the past I don't know anything about the programming side of this job and I can only report the issues and troubles I'm facing but just to be able to picture you what I was talking about let me explain it this way.

A poorly secured bank with no checking out at the entrance and no camera for monitoring the activities of the clients would be of a breeze for thieves to rub it in no time and mess with the whole system and bringing it down (of course in this bank you have the chance to enter the bank sooner and do you things faster, as a fact) but a bank with highly secured entrance with a detailed checking process of clients, nice monitoring through hidden cameras and strong security system would be of a nightmare for thieves and bugs to bring it down easily (and of course for this one you're gonna spend more time (not as fast as a poorly secured bank) but at the end of the day you are sure that you are putting your money somewhere safe and stable). through this example I just wanted to point out that I find it so hard to believe that buzz users are looking for sth that loads up on the fly with whole a lot of holes in it for corrupted stuff to bring it down rather than sth that loads with more delay but gives you a stable place to work at. I guarantee you that ppl are pretty reluctant to choose speed over stability. briefly what good is in speed without stability.

btw doesn't a buggy machine send corrupted packages of data to the master? maybe using look-ahead technology helps master to prevent stuff to bring it down. Like in the old buzz if a machine was not available in the gear folder, buzz would close only for one lousy missing machine! well that was a bug in buzz not to be able to handle it, not the machine which was gone. and thanks to Oskari that fixed it. so why can't buzz ignore the output of a corrupted machine and still allow the session to go on? What I'm trying to say is a little corrupted thieve like EQ-10 or SVERB should not be given the space to mess with the whole system! right now I can not even SAVE my projects! all the time I'm getting the error "Buzz Has Stopped Working"!!!!!!!! Whyyyy? okay assuming if I have the worst buggy machines in my session, why they should be able to cause this big malfunction to close the whole program down? again I don't know anything about coding but let's hope for a day that even the worst machines on BM can not be able to cause these huge malfunctions.

If you had the time please have a look at the screen shot of the session I'm only trying to SAVE.



this is also my engine setting,

Acurate BPM: False
The rest is true But the subtick timing it is set to false as well.
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UNZ
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by UNZ »

look, that screenshot has roughly 120 machines in it. its not easy to forsee all the problems that happen if that many machines made by different people will interact.
yes people prefer stable software, but as i said, all the buzzmachines you use would NOT RUN AT ALL if buzz was a lot more strict and disabled them.
I can probably name a bug in each machine you have in your screenshot that would justify disabling it if we used a strict process like you call for.
The reality is pretty much all buzzmachines are in various state of buggyness except a very small set of machines that have stood the test of time (my guess is that its under 20).
For example hal machines: they where good sounding, but not the most stable ones, personally i deleted every single one of his because they caused problems.

Also stability comes at a price: it takes a lot of time to make a system like buzz stable, and not even commercial hosts (for example ableton) manage to keep the host stable when various plugins freak out.
There have been some advancements in this area, such as running each plugin in its own process, but again, it sucks out a lot of performance and its no holy grail either.
You'd be the first to complain if your .bmx wouldn't even work in MME because of CPU overload.

And lastly think about how to debug this if you would send your bmx to (for example) oskari.
You think he's going to buy every single piece of commercial software in your bmx just to solve your issue ?
There's maybe 6000$ worth of software in your screenshot, and the problem might as well stem from one of those vst.

And you're honestly using too many machines here, i bet half of them could go and the sound would stay the same.
Sorry but you're on your own here: delete machines until you find the one that is problematic.
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

People are using these stuff more than me on Logic, Pro tools, Reaper and recently reason has been adding some new plugins to it's gear list (produced by various developers). but only if I could save the project I would have removed them all but again I'm not sure if these are the plugins causing this issue.

I never said I have a cpu usage issue on polac MME, I said I switch back to Polac MME to save some room for my CPU so that I can take a listen when the song is being played. I said ASIO drivers are tough on my cpu not wave drivers.

In this project these are the buzz native machines I'm using.

Joachim PowerPan
Larsha Funkyverb
EQ-10
Cyanphase Stereo Meld
Firesledge Param EQ
X-Delay
HD Bguitar
Kick XP
KFlanger
Mtrk 2
Mtrk 3
Mrtk
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bahador
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Plus I can not even save this.
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by UNZ »

what happens if you remove ALL machines then try to save as a new file?
if that doesn't work, you can try to import your old file into a new bmx and safe that (pretty much the last thing i can think of).

and about asio vs mme: the only reason the mme drivers work better for you is because they use higher latency setting. you can use asio with high latency too (say 2048 or 4096 buffersizes) while solving your other (samplerate) issues.
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by double07 »

Have you tried using WASAPI drivers instead of ASIO? WASAPI always works well for me but ASIO seems to be buggy as hell on my setup.
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Re: Windows 7 and a long story.

Post by bahador »

Double I've been using them all taken from wasapi, polac mme and polac asio. but I think the issue is being caused either by larsha funkyverb or hypersonic.

But sth completely out of the blue, truth to be told, the new feature of exporting midi through the new sequencer in the pattern editor rocks big time, a big thanks to Oskari for incorporating such incredible easy to use feature. But just the tempo of the released midi doesn't match the original tempo of the song. I posted another threat regarding that issue and one of the users believes the issue is obvious for that matter but he is still to let us know what it is that causes this tempo change.

and yes Antonio I've imported that in new project and still didn't succeed but I think it is one of the two machines I'm using.
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