Subject:Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Posted by: skater

Date:6/2/2003 9:14:47 AM

I've been using Acid Pro--a, and various b patches with no trouble but suddenly --or maybe co-incidentally with installing vegas 4, Acid crashes before it even gets off the ground. I WAS using Creative Sound Blaster but just 'upgraded' to Audigy for the ASIO support better latency. Every other Sound Foundry, Steinberg and Cakewalk product, including Forge, Cubase, Sonar.... seems to work without a glitch but not Acid 4--not any more.

I can't even get a debug on this because the Acid splash screen freezes my C++ debugger--which is unusual. What I can see is this error:
The instruction at "0x005cbdf8" referenced memory at "0x000000". The memory could not be "read" and then I have to use the task manager to close it down.

Just thought I'd ask....

Abit kt7, AMD 2100, ATI Radion 8500, Audigy 2 Platinum, 1 gig ram....

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:6/2/2003 12:09:30 PM

I only get that error when burning to CD. I have a Radeon as well. It's a little better when video acceleration is disabled, but it still can crash.

What OS are you using? I've heard XP (which is what I'm using) has a tendency to do this for some reason or another.

Iacobus

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: skater

Date:6/2/2003 4:09:20 PM

OH yeah I forgot--it's WIN2k. Actually I've made some progress. I'm starting to think it wasn't installing Vegas 4 that lead to my grief by rather uninstalling Acid 3.

I was able to kill the intro screen and do a little debugging. Acid.exe hangs with this move instruction:
mov edx, dword ptr (eax)

Right now I'm looking at write protected .dll's and .acm files. With UNIX you can often get into problems when file and folder permissions are set incorrectly for the userbase. Windows, of course, is hardly a secure OS but sometimes 2000 puts on airs and it is possible to have things go really awry for the most banal and idiotic reasons--and it's hell to finger a culprit.

At any rate I still haven't collared any particular file, driver, incompatibility. Acid isn't that high up on my sound editing food chain but I would like to figure this out.

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: skater

Date:6/2/2003 9:26:13 PM

OK I debugged my problem to unhanded exceptions raised by Acid pro with it's own MIDI libraries:
sfdlssynth.dll
sfvstisynth.dll

Rename them to "trash1.dll" & "trash2.dll" solves the crash problem. I still think it's windows related....

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: pwppch

Date:6/2/2003 10:56:28 PM

ACID must have sfdlssynth.dll available. What if you restore this file and leave the sfvstisynth.dll renamed?

Peter

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: skater

Date:6/2/2003 11:58:01 PM

Hmm. Well unfortunately it's sfdlssynth.dll that's crashing Acid Pro. I'll keep plugging away at this.

Even though I suspect more than one felon in this crime wave, including windows itself and a rogues gallery of audio and video codec's and apps,--as I step through with the debugger, Acid.exe crashes against sfdlssynth.dll without making any outside calls to anything else. Here's where things go seriously south:
02574170 mov ecx,dword ptr [eax]

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: shitcomputer

Date:6/4/2003 4:19:40 AM

Did you try uninstalling acid and re installing it??? Thats what i woulda tried

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: skater

Date:6/4/2003 12:43:09 PM

Yes I did, thanks,
By the time someone get down to dissembling code and stepping through it a line at a time in a debugger--it's a pretty good bet they've already done things like clean re-installs.

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: rblatz

Date:6/4/2003 9:04:41 PM

I have the same problem, skater, I'm using 2003 and I could use acid 4.0 fine but c and d refuse to get past the splash screen. Looking forward to seeing what you find out.

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: rblatz

Date:6/4/2003 9:43:18 PM

Hey I updated my directx to 9.0a and everything seems to work now. Maybe acid should do a check like that before installing???

Subject:RE: Acid Pro above 4.0 crashes at the splash screen.

Reply by: skater

Date:6/9/2003 2:45:48 PM

OK I got it figured out. Turns out it WAS a Directx problem even though I was already running 9a.--My installation was missing registry items that were causing problems with the mini drivers. The debugger kept flagging a bad write on EUX and EAX and that looked suspiciously like there was a problem moving data in and out of audio/multimedia registers.

Anyway I had to roll back to Directx 7.1 and that version prompted me for the Win2000 CD for it's install and it cleaned up a bunch of crap that Directx8 & 9 were not about to fix. I lucked out in that I had an DX uninstall routine AND legacy Directx installation files. Microsoft does not offer or support anything but the latest version nor do they support any kind of uninstall.

Edited to add:
Once Directx7.1 cleaned up the Registry I was then able to upgrade back up to Directx9.0a and everything NOW seems to be working--including Acid 4d