Hi,
my prime4 rebooted yesterday night during a life set after about 45 minutes in while loading a track.
Is there anything I can do? This is firmware 1.4.1.
best, iaad
What were you doing in the moments up to the reboot?
Provide as many details as possible.
Kim’s was it running from SD cars or serato, usb sticks (Male, model), internal drive (make, model) , extrenal hard drive ? Length of track playing, length of track loading in, any other devices plugged into the prime etc
well, so the track I loaded was 6:40 I think, the track I played at the time a bit under 6 minutes, I guess.
I was recording onto a SD card, class 10 Intenso SDHC 16GB (about 30% used) I was playing from a USB thumb drive where I don’t know the make. I had nothing plugged into the prime4 (master out and headphones of course, but nothing else than my thumbdrives and the SD card). No drive installed in the device, too.
What I was doing? Well… playing tracks, right? EQing, Effects, you name it!
I do experience UI glitches (mostly just hanging) every now and then while loading a track, but normally it catches up after 2-5 seconds… not this time though.
That could be the issue right there.
Is that because it’s a cheap one from ebay etc. or you just haven’t looked?
No, it is a relatively new one that came with my notebook, it is reasonably fast and a USB3 one, it never failed once, so I kinda doubt that this is the actual issue. It might be, sure, but I doubt it. Especially because I am have minor glitches and hanging interface on the Prime4 no matter where I load tracks from (not yet tested internal drive though).
The other thumbdrive I play from is a 32GB USB3.0 “Transcend” drive and things are a bit glitchy from time to time, too.
Of course I can re-verify everything with my internal drive as soon as I have installed it.
Transcend are almost as bad, in fact, probably the same as the cheap, unbranded and free usb thumb drives.
Try to isolate whether this problems ever happens with a branded and high quality usb thumb drive - SanDisk and Corsair are good, but not from eBay. Also isolate whether this happens when you’re not recording - especially if trying to record to the same device your music files are on
I will. I never record to the same drive though, I have a dedicated SD card for recording installed in the prime4.
Time to buy some high quality USB drives then! Thanks for your support so far!
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I’ve got two identical SanDisk Cruzer Edge sticks here. Both 64GB, both bought from the same retailer in person on the same day. I noticed in use though, one is noticeably slower than the other.
I just did a test using some free software (USB Flash Benchmark) and one unit has: Average read 22MB/s Average write 10MB/s
The other one has: Average read 10MB/s Average write 8.5MB/s
Some usb flash drives have redundancy levels.
Think of it as 16 roads for data to travel down. If a road is blocked then data can still go down the 15 good roads but traffic flow slows.
The average daily user wouldn’t even notice when shifting a few photos or saving some word processing or the such but audio and video need good flow. If it were me I’d get it swapped by the maker.
Some makers might swap what chip layout they use too as supply and demand on chips wavers. So 32gig drive could be 4 x 8gig chips or 8 x 4gig chips - same total but different speeds on data flow
Everyone is jumping to conclusions here and suggesting band-aid solutions per say…I would argue that if the cause was really the USB, the system should not reboot. that’s what Denon can/should address.
I am not suggesting everyone’s guesses are wrong, but I would insist on you to reproduce it to be sure. IF you are able to reproduce it, start taking elements that you can out one by one and try again. only then you can really say it was the USB. I would also contact Denon to see if they have a backdoor to the crash logs or something.
Sometimes that’s all it needs:
Sometimes it’s a shielded cable instead of a supermarket one.
Sometimes it’s a powered Hub instead of a chrome plated flashy unpowered one.
Other times it’s a €50 usb flash drive instead of a €30 one.
For anything other than history based suggestions the original poster needs to work out the exact steps and tracks which can replicate the reboot ten times out of ten
@DJ_Sontag I don’t disagree mate. perhaps I should have been a bit more clear and say, while looking in to the USB stick, keep an open mind and don’t rule out everything else.
Cheers
Have all your tracks been prepped & analysed in E.P. The fact that your system occasionally has glitches points towards a slow drive (usb, sd card, etc) or possibly database problems. If you haven’t created a database & analysed your files, it will put extra strain on the P4 processor, which in conjunction with a slow / mediocre drive would result in glitches. Add to that, another slow drive while recording & you have a recipe for a potential reboot situation - My 2cents anyway.
I had something similar recently. If it is possible I would like an error message when the prime doesn’t like a track, instead of immediately rebooting the system. Three times during a gig, while loading a new track, the prime crashed and rebooted. Not fun if you have dancing people in front of you. And I don’t know why, the tracks play in every other device I have.
As no one else is experiencing anything like that level or frequency of disliked tracks, it would be a good idea to let an mp3 checker software take a look at all your music files. It could take it days to check a batch load of files so don’t download and try such software just before a gig though
Tracks are all from beatport, so I assume they are good. And they all have been analyzed in EP.
I had my first reboot yesterday on the Prime 4.
I was using Beatport Link, and switching (fairly quickly) back & forth between the playlist view and search view, trying to see if I could search playlists, when I hit the search icon and the P4 froze for a sec then rebooted.
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Beautiful. Almost like it was with Windows 95 or 98. It would also take the “blue screen of death” to be similar. 
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I did a show last weekend where I played a 3:40h set without any reboot or other issues! The trick: I bought two 64GB SanDisk USB 3.0 drives. Worked like a charm!
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