Memory leaks, music, and sound

[Al E. Cat]

I wanted to share with others problems I've noticed related to ToonTown memory usage. Machine configuration is a 1GHz AMD Athlon, SBLive Value, and ATI Radeon 9700.

1. There seems to be a definite memory leak related to music. With music enabled, I'll have to restart ToonTown after playing for half an hour or so.

2. With music enabled, after ~30 minutes, some of the notes will start to sound out of pitch. This gets progressively worse to the point that all the music sounds like something from a demented theme park. I expect killer mimes to start appearing. I now only play with the TT music turned off.

3. Playing music in the background with WinAmp causes weird laggy behavior with TT in the foreground. TT seems to respond with several 100 milliseconds of latency when responding to the keyboard. This is a real problem when navigating streets or playing the trolley games. For example, tapping a key to adjust the cannon will move it several clicks instead of one. I've tried reducing the thread priority of WinAmp, and it seemed to help a little, but not solve the problem. I've only tried this with TT in fullscreen mode.

Anyone else have similar experiences? I'd really like to get one of these problems solved; I NEED some kind of music to play TT!

BTW, I put my 30GB of mp3 music on random shuffle while playing, and sometimes get some pretty surreal juxtapositions of music for TT, like running around in DG with Type O Negative.

[Princess Beany]

I have many problems with my music. I try to not play with it on too. I am like you tho. I have to have some kind of background music so I end up turning it on. The 5minute lv 5 bldg dances go by faster with music. But My prob with my music is it tends to freeze or get stuck during street battles. Very painful on the ears. I can sometimes fix it by going back to the playground or going in a door. If that doesn't fix it I have to go all the way out of TT and reload the game. Big pain in the heiny. I have no solutions as I am comuter stupid. lol

[Kraker]

You may be in luck, only time will tell.

I had these problems myself and i did a full 2day search and nothing else to come up with an answer. Now this may not help you and may not be your problem, but it did help me, and it was my problem and here is how i solved it. Im going to try and not speak technically and just relative so you get the idea.

There is a known problem with sound blaster live value cards operating in some mobo's. In my case i happened to have an asus with via chipset. From what i understand the way that soundcard worked in combination to your mobo would cause it to flood or buffer data untill it would mess up the system.

The good news is, via has an update and so does most of the mobo manufactures. I am not going to tell you to update your mobo bios because its very easy to mess up and ruin your motherboard.

However in my case it helped fix the problem. There was a patch that was offered for a short time and now that most mobo manufacturers have fixed this problem with a bios upgrade the patch should be removed if you used it.

I updated; mobo bios, via drivers (read that as chipset) and soundblaster drivers.

Ill leave it up to you, if your comfortable and have done a bios flash before it may help you.

[Al E. Cat]

There are numerous BIOS updates for my motherboard (Abit KT7, Via chipset) but all require a DOS/Win9X boot disk. I haven't been able to find one of these for years. Seriously. I might have to see if we have a Win98 machine somewhere at work I can create one with.

I've tried flashing from XP, and Award's flash program fails.

[Kraker]

The way i did it was, created a boot disk with XP then copied the flash utitlity. I also had to switch my boot sequence in the bios to boot from the floppy.

Some mobo have to have some setting enabled to allow flashing, and also to make sure a shadowed something is off. Sorry i forget the specifics. The directions i got from my mobo maker also said to remove the autoexec.bat file and i think config.sys if it creates one, but its different for every board.

I try not to suggest this to people becuase i have known it to easily mess up and ruin the mobo.

[Al E. Cat]

The AWDFLASH (Award BIOS flash utility) refuses to work under NT, 2000, or XP.

I dug through my file cabinet and bit more thoroughly and I finally found an old Windows 95 startup disk. I was able to flash my BIOS to the latest official release from ABIT.

The good news is that this solves a long standing ACPI and IDE controller initialization error that was being flagged in the system error log. (For the curious, using Windows XP, run Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. Look in the system event log. Lots of interesting stuff in there about device startup status.)

I'll keep you posted as to what the results are with TT.

[Kraker]

Originally posted by Al E. Cat [B(For the curious, using Windows XP, run Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. Look in the system event log. Lots of interesting stuff in there about device startup status.) [/b]

You know i could have been happy with my os till you had me look in there

Should i be worried at all of the red x errors and yellow cautions in there?

[Al E. Cat]

This is obviously painting with a pretty broad brush, but I'd say that every red "X" is a potential performance hit. For example, after I flashed the BIOS, I discovered that my CD-ROM drive is finally supported through multi-word DMA instead of PIO mode, which should be much faster.

Thanks for convincing me to spend the time and effort to flash my BIOS.

You are a genius!

[Sniffy]

make sure your sound drivers are up-to-date. that's the first place to check when you have sound/music problems.

[Dusty McGadget]

I know this is an old thread, but I thought I'd mention this. When I first went onto Toontown and encountered this music bug, I knew EXACTLY what the problem was, because it was a common bug with midi-related music. It was simple to test my theory, and after I was content that it was correct, I emailed the info on to the programmers. I'll try to give the explanation here in as little technical terminology as I can.

Basically, a MIDI consists of a set of instructions telling the program to play notes, and how. Things like, what pitch the note is, how long it's held for, the velocity (volume), etc. Often, instructions are also put in for the "controllers" of the instruments, which allow for other effects such as "pitch bending", which is sliding the note slightly higher or lower. A perfect example of a pitch bend is on the trolly games, when you're getting the jellybeans tallied up after a game. Listen to the instruments as they're playing, and notice how they slide from one note to the next at certain points.

Now, herein lies the problem. Controller data is not reset automatically. If we've received the start of a pitch bend, it'll lower the pitch of, say, instrument #2 by a certain amount, but if the music stops playing before we've given it the instruction to return the pitch bend to zero, the instruction never comes, and the pitch bend stays in place. Even when the music changes, anything that plays after that will have a pitch bend on instrument #2. And most midis don't contain instructions at the beginning to fix this sort of thing, since they automatically assume that conditions are ideal when the music starts playing... so when it goes to the next song, the instrument will remain out-of-tune.

I think you'll find that the music starts getting out-of-tune right after playing trolly games, and it's for precisely that reason. As proof that this is indeed the cause, if you're having the music problems, jump back onto the trolly and play a game, and then while the jellybean music is playing, let the music play through a bit, and then exit at a point where there's no pitch bend going on. Now that the instruction has been delivered to return the pitch bend to normal, you'll find that the instruments are once again back in tune. You can do this anytime it happens, so it's a nice temporary "fix"... and, of course, if you exit at the proper time anyway, it'll prevent it from happening in the first place.

The permanent solution, of course, lies in having that extra instruction sent to reset the pitch bend levels of all instruments just before any music is played. I let them know this, so hopefully it'll be fixed in the next update.

Dreamland has had similar problems, where if you've visited there, you get instruments that seem to hold out, or instruments in other areas that suddenly have a mysterious echo added to them. This is for the same exact reason; the music in Dreamland is supplying instructions to add reverb effects, but isn't clearing them out, so they carry over onto other songs. Unfortunately, there's no temporary fix for this, so usually I just turn off my music before entering Dreamland. A shame, too, because the music there is nice.

Hope this clears things up. Worse comes to worst, at least you know how to fix the out-of-tune music if it happens without having to log off of Toontown to do it.

[Cool Curly]

The background music plays fine for me but I seem to have lost the sound effects for gags when used. Just wondering if anyone else has this same problem and have found a fix for it.

running TT- LE
Win XP
SB Live card

Cool Curly..........The Cool Dog

[Silly Kippy]

Dusty McGadget, that is amazingly informative, thank you for that!