-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL AMCS TROUBLESHOOTING the Advance Music Construction System SUBJECT General: Troubleshooting SUMMARY An attempt to pre-empt any potential issues with the system. GENERAL Q) The system will not continue past a non-black blank display when powering on. A) Please ensure you have the manufacturer supplied system SD card inserted before you start. The SD card can then later be swapped for another once the system is functional. Q) I have the manufacturer supplied SD card in the system, but it is not continuing past the non-black blank display when powering on. A) It is likely the contacts on the SD card have become tarnished and are not making good contact. Use a cloth and electrical contact cleaner to clean the nine brass contacts located on the back of the SD card. Q) I have plugged the HDMI cable in, but the interface is not showing. A) The HDMI cable must be plugged in during power on. Q) Some buttons in the section Function Panel do not do anything when pressed. A) The system is currently being developed and that particular feature is not available at the moment. Q) The framerate on the screen seems low. A) This is normal behaviour, the display update is processed at a low priority to make way for any higher priority audio processing. Q) I have several function effects stacked on an instrument and the timing seems to be skewing. A) A function effect intervals at a hundred times a second, multiply that exponentially and it will either exceed the MIDI bandwidth limit or be too much throughput for the processing to handle. It is recommended you try to optimise the composition. Q) Generated Waveforms seem to phase with other sound sources, why is that? A) The internal Waveforms are actually tuned to 51200Hz and then pitched to 44100Hz for memory alignment and optimisation purposes. Although the pitching attempts to be accurate there will be some error in handling finite calculations. Q) Some of my MIDI instruments do not respond to playing certain octaves. A) Unfortunately some instruments limit the range that can be used, this is especially noticeable in the MIDI functions and the only work around is to cap the Path Waveform within the range. It should be noted that testing revealed some instrument firmware will crash if you exceed the note range, and can only be recovered from by power cycling the instrument. MEMORY Q) The system is showing the message memory depleted when the configuration reports there being memory available. A) This is normal behaviour as the system will attempt to keep enough memory available for storing a song to the storage. Low memory systems will be more likely to display this message when manipulating instruments rapidly, try waiting a few seconds for the memory to be tidied up. STORAGE Q) I have tried to use a storage card which is bigger than 4GB and the available space is not showing up correctly. A) The system only supports 4GB partitions, it is recommended you use a smaller card or try re-partitioning the card so that the primary partition is 4GB or less. Q) I have tried to use an MMC storage card, but the system does not show it as active. A) MMC cards are not supported. Q) I have started getting more Verification Failed messages during a store. A) This can be either the SD card is coming to expiration or the filesystem has become corrupt. If you get this error multiple times whilst trying to store, try an alternate SD in the meantime. The corruption issue can be fixed by copying everything off the card, reformatting and then copying the data back. Q) I have stored some work but now the system says it is defective. A) Contact us, we may be able to help you recover most if not all of the storage. MIDI Q) When I try to send some notes to an external sequencer or soft-synth it does not respond correctly. A) Unfortunately some software does not implement velocity based note handling, and by default the system will use this method to support older synthesisers. You can switch the method from velocity to function in the System Configuration section, but if the external software still fails to understand the MIDI transmission then we recommend you use something else which does not have MIDI support as an after thought. Q) There appears to be a slight delay when I try to record MIDI. A) It is recommended you disable the clock transmit on a MIDI instrument since this is unused and filtered out by the system. The clock transmission occurs 96 times a beat which can use up a lot of the MIDI communication bandwidth. Q) I have connected the MIDI instrument but it does not seem to respond to anything the system is transmitting. A) This is a common issue, most MIDI instruments default to not receive MIDI or at least the channel is not the same as the internal instrument. Please consult the manual for your MIDI instrument on how to set the MIDI receive. USB Q) I have connected the latest USB gadget and it is not activating. A) As with all technology the next incarnation of gadgets seems to try and obsolete existing capable technologies for the sake of profit. Try to stick to recommended USB devices or at least devices which are compatible with USB 1. Q) Connected devices seem to be constantly reactivating. A) A device on the USB is not behaving itself, try a process of elimination by disconnecting each device until it stops happening. Some low cost devices require a huge amount of work to support since they generally misbehave during enumeration, we cannot prioritise development towards making these work. USB-MIDI Q) When I boot the system, the USB-MIDI device sometimes does not activate. A) This is an issue related to USB timing, if the device does not respond within a certain time frame it is assumed as unavailable. The system does not continually scan the USB to see if anything new is connected since this will use up the bus bandwidth for more useful device communication. Either disconnect-reconnect the USB-MIDI device and wait a few seconds or reboot the system, this should solve the issue. Q) I have connected a USB-MIDI device and it is not activating. A) Only recommended devices should be used. From some research it has become apparent that some manufacturers have chosen to not conform exactly to the USB-MIDI specification, whilst we do attempt to support as many of the common devices as possible, it is unreasonable to support them all. Q) I have connected a USB-MIDI device and it is showing as active, but the MIDI instrument is not responding. A) Try connecting the MIDI receive connector to a powered MIDI instrument prior to connecting the USB connector on the USB-MIDI device. For some reason certain USB-MIDI devices can decide to fail initialisation if the MIDI receive is not attached. RELATED General: Glossary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- r06102022 Return to the contents page