Question? Why does my PWT freeze up when I leave a cd in it for more than 10-15 minutes before hitting the play button? Sometimes I preload a cd and go about my business and when I return to listen to said cd the transport will not respond to the remote commands. I have to turn the unit off and reboot in order for a return to normal operation. Anyone else have this problem? Thanks for any help…
I have a similar problem with out the CD in the tray I leave the PWT on over night and the next day the tray will not respond to the remote or the touch screen so have to reboot from the switch on the back. I have learned to live with it so it is not too much of a bother.
Brent
I have found this problem to be quite frustrating at times. Hoping next update will fix
I also have this problem when I leave a disc in the drawer for a while (sometime minutes, sometimes hours), either prior to or after playing, but not all the time. Neither the touch screen or remote will respond, and turning the rear power switch off and back on is the only way to reset. Using the front switch to go to Standby does not help.
I have tried to figure out if it is related to inserting a new disk for the first time (one that I haven’t played in the PWT before) and some combination of whether it finds and downloads the track list and cover art on the PS Audio site, but so far, no consistent pattern that I can figure out so that I can reproduce it. I have even had this happen with CDs I have played before and the track list and cover art are already on the SD card.
Unfortunately, the date on the latest firmware (PWT 1.21) is 2/15/2012, so I doubt that PS Audio will be releasing a fix for this unless this catches their attention and enough customers say me too.
Thanks for the reply guys.
Anyone from PS Audio care to reply?
We can certainly try and duplicate the problem but it’s not one we see often. I’ll check with Dave to see if it’s something we can affect in the PIC or if it is in the FPGA. If the former it can be addressed, the latter it cannot.
To be honest we haven’t spent much time on upgrading the PWT unless there was a serious problem that happened to most owners. Yours may be a problem that is unusual. I routinely leave discs in my transport and nothing is changed when I return the next day. I have to open the drawer and start the process over, but that’s been a limitation we’ve known of since the day we launched the product.
If yours is acting differently than other PWTs, perhaps it needs a new drive. Have you contacted our service department? They’re not hard to replace and sometimes fixs the problem.
Paul,thanks for the reply. I was more interested in the 'why' of the problem [strange for sure] than the fix to it. I do not make a habit of leaving a disk in the PWT before listening to it, but on occasion, I do. I would rather not ship the transport back for something as minor as this [the shipping process in general gives me pause]. If a firmware update can do the fix... I most certainly would give that a try... Mark
I would not mind if all it took was to eject the CD and reload it, but when the touch screen becomes non-responsive, then I can’t even eject the CD until after a hard power of reboot.
I work in the computer software business, and my one guess is that the process that reads the track list and cover art, whether from the internet or the SD card, might be getting hung so that the PWT is waiting for something to finish before it continues, and since it never finishes, or times out, it just sits there waiting. I first suspected this shortly after I got my PWT. I had cover art on the SD card that only showed half of the image on the display and then hung. I found a corrupt cover art file on the SD card, and the problem for that CD went away after I deleted the cover art file and let it re-download from the PS Audio site.
If Dave determines that a new drive is the solution, then I will contact service about replacing the drive. Since I have built several PCs from scratch, I should be able to replace the drive myself if you send me one, and that is allowed. That would save shipping and down time.
On my PWT, there is a brief period of time when the cover art is downloading when the screen is unresponsive. I think you’re on to something when you say that this process may be locking up your unit. Have you tried a different SD card? Try one that is 1GB or 2GB.
Alternatively, try disconnecting the PWT from the network and see if the problem persists.
-Pb
I’ve not heard of this particular situation, but we do have experience with the PWT freezing in a few situations:
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A corrupt file on the SD card
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A poor connection to the internet
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Some discs with damage, or not common formats
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Drive problems
The suggestions in the previous posts are good ones. Would you mind doing some experiments to see if we can narrow down the cause:
a) disconnect the SD card
b) disconnect the Ethernet cable
c) Is it always the same disc?
Dave
Dave P. said I've not heard of this particular situation, but we do have experience with the PWT freezing in a few situations:
A corrupt file on the SD card
A poor connection to the internet
Some discs with damage, or not common formats
Drive problems
The suggestions in the previous posts are good ones. Would you mind doing some experiments to see if we can narrow down the cause:
a) disconnect the SD card
b) disconnect the Ethernet cable
c) Is it always the same disc?
Dave
Hi Dave,
Yes I am willing to do some tests. I am using a 2Gb SD card. As I recall, the filenames on the SD card do not indicate which CD they belong to. Do you have any tricks for matching up SD files to the corresponding CD, or any way to scan the SD files to see which ones are corrupt?
I can tell you for certain that this does not always happen on the same CD. I will start creating a log of CDs that I load, whether it is a first time loading the CD, whether it finds the track list and cover art, whether I add track information or cover art through my playlist, etc.
If the display locks up, I will power down and see if it locks up again on that CD before trying removing the SD card, disconnecting the Ethernet cable etc.
The files on the SD card are in pairs. One is a text file about 1kB in size that is readable with a text editor. The coverart file is about 50kB, is in bmp format, and can be viewed with a picture editor. The file name is the CDDB ID that is used to query the various databases on the internet for the metadata. I don’t know of any way for humans to tell from the title what CD it goes with. The only way to tell is look at the metadata or coverart.
I haven’t studied corrupted SD cards. I usually just reformat a suspect card and start fresh, so I can’t speak from experience on how to detect a corrupt file on a particular card. Next time it occurs though, I’ll take a look.
Dave
I am away at the moment, but I too will check when I return.