3 days ago i bought the controller, and yesterday i played for the first time with it in the club. I use the latest version of Serato and i did update allready the newest firmware of the controller. In 3 hours i had 2 problems!! Check video below: only the view button works, the rest of the buttons didnt work, the music still playing… 2 times in 3 hours! What can i do? Check video: - YouTube
Did the two problems happen while the laptop was cold eg: near the beginning of the set, or both problems near the end/laptop warm etc? See other threads about hot latency vs cold latency. Laptops run slower when hot.
When you tried the laptop and 8000 at home before the gig, like on day 1, or 2, did the same problems come up or only happened at the venue?
It takes a significantly powerful laptop to drive two colour screens fast and a soundcard and a midi controller (the 8000 is obviously all for those things rolled into one.
At home try increasing the sound card latency to something safe and high (maybe 100+ms just as a test) and drop the refresh rates on the screens too - to give the laptop lass to think about. Remember to get the laptop toasty hot first to simulate how the laptop copes when the laptop is running at its slowest.
Normal laptop optimisation required too obviously.
Avoid using USB hubs, and avoid running any high current drain items off of the laptop or MCX USB (such as unpowered USB hard drives etc). Poorly/damaged music files and incorrectly formatted files and/or those not analysed by Engine (new 8000 compliant Engine coming soon) can cause issues in themselves.
I don’t know why this keeps getting stated that we need some Uber powerful laptop to drive two midi displays and an external sound card. The CPU utilization when I am running Serato is always low and I have had screen freezes and distortion issues. I think there was only like. 3% difference is CPU utilization when I moved from a Pioneer sx-2 and the mcx8000. Also, we need to stop blaming USB 2.0 as the issue as well. USB 2.0 has enough bandwidth to drive 4 mcx8000s if the drivers and software allowed it. I have run 20 channels of high resolution digital audio off a single USB 2.0 connection to a behringer x32 mixer. Two channels isn’t even making it sweat.
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It’s good that you’re getting low cpu usage on your particular laptop. Although, as you’ve mentioned your cpu usage did go up when moving to a fuller featured controller (dual full colour displays, sound card, lots of LEDs to drive, lots of encoders to “watch” etc ) which is the point that people need to understand.
You’ve not mentioned what spec your laptop is, but of course those small increases that you’ve seen when going up to a fuller featured controller, would be much larger increases for someone with a lower spec lappy.
Similarly USB data transfer isn’t as clear cut as total bandwidth. Sustained transfers and streaming versus burst mode for data can be handled quite differently by some lappys compared to others.
Sadly it’s not always as clear cut as “mine does it this way, so yours will do it this way too”.
We’ve seen in the past that even sending display data of alphanumeric characters to a midi display can reallly drag a system down and indeed for many, they had to push their latency up and up to very high numbers in order to get the sound to stay distortion free when driving the displays with artist name, song title etc - and that wasn’t even HD, colour or with scrolling waveforms.
Denon should publish a laptop spec recommended for the 8000 then.
How does this explain screen / controller freeze in standalone?
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