Deck A repeats, ignores deck B

[Gary Tayman]

I recently tried out Zulu and love it -- to the point where I installed and registered it on my laptop. Easy to use, documentation is easy to understand, but I am running across a strange problem once in awhile. I don't know if it is a bug or something I'm doing that's causing it. It has not done it often enough for me to tell for sure.

 

The problem is this: it seems to happen (in auto playback mode) just after I'm "taking a request." I'll search in the playlist for a song, or maybe even find it in my library and add it, then select it. The song loads into deck B. Then, when the song in deck A is finished, it should go to deck B to play the next song, right? Sometimes it doesn't do that; instead it will load another song into deck A and play it -- then when that song is finished, it will THEN go to deck B.

 

It's not as if I'm loading the song at the very last second; usually the song in deck A has a minute or more to go. I'm still in Auto mode, and usually still in shuffle mode, but surprise surprise, instead of switching to deck B, it plays another in deck A.

 

It has never done this in reverse; it's always deck A. Deck B has never played two songs in a row.

 

Any clues?

[Gary Tayman]

Seems my question may have been answered before I asked it. I was using version 2.37; there is now a version 2.38 and apparently this includes a bug fix for jumping to deck A. I have a few gigs the next week or so, so I'll be putting it to the test.

[Gary Tayman]

Well, after a couple of weeks this HAS been put to the test, and the results are getting quite frustrating!

 

This is a tale of two computers, both running version 2.38. One of these is an HP laptop, 64 bit, running Windows 7. For the most part it is excellent, but twice it has acted up. In both cases I had just loaded a song into one of the decks, and instead of switching to that deck it reloaded new songs into both decks and played something else. In one case it was still calculating BPM; in the other I had just loaded it as it was about to switch, so I'll give these the benefit of the doubt.

 

However the other computer is a Toshiba laptop, 32 bit running Windows XP. It belongs to a friend of mine, and he has tried several times in vain to register the software and it doesn't work -- paid for but it's still the trial version. We cannot use auto mode at all on this computer, because nearly every song it hiccups -- loads both decks and plays out of deck A again. I watched it once as deck B continued to load songs while Deck A played the music. Loaded another song, another song, another song, another song, another song, took SIX songs before it settled down, and when it came time to switch to deck B it hiccupped and reloaded again. Sometimes even in manual mode you have to click on Play two or three times before the song will play.

 

This is absolutely terrible, rendering the software virtually unusable, but it's obvious there's another element involved because it's almost flawless on the HP computer. Suggestions? My friend is going nuts trying to register the software, but is this contributing to the hiccups? Is the problem related to the 32-bit machine, or Windows XP? Could the sound card or related codecs be involved? I'd like to get some answers because, well, we're not finished; when all is said and done there will be several more laptops using this software. Several DJ's in the area are watching; we all want to use the same software so we can easily work with each other; we love Zulu except for this particular bug. If we can get this fixed we're good to go. BTW, I sent a bug report related to these hiccups while calculating BPM's, but have not heard a reply.

[Gary Tayman]

Imagine, three months and one day after purchasing Zulu, there is an update to 2.39 that supposedly fixes this hiccup problem. Within three months I could have upgraded. Then again, it was 2.37 I started with, and 2.38 was supposed to have fixed this.

 

No matter; I and my friends have all switched to something else.