Recording audio output crashed system

Replay AV really messed me up this weekend. Because it’s not downloading streams at the moment from a lot of stations, it’s recording the audio output. On Saturday it opened a player and started playing, but for some reason was not able to detect the sound, even though it was certainly coming through the speakers. It opened up another player, so they’re playing over each other (but offset, so you hear an echo effect), and still couldn’t detect the sound. I guess in the 3 hours, it opened up one per minute, so when I walked in the front door there must have been 180 open and trying to play! It was “white noise” that sounded like the crowd at a football stadium or like static from a TV tuned to a channel with no station. No surprise, there was also a window open that said “Fatal Error.” It took me several minutes to shut down all the windows (which was kind of neat to hear the voices start to become recognizable as the players closed). Then I rebooted, but windows would not load properly! After several failed reboots, I had no other choice but to reinstall Windows 7! I’m pretty good about backing up files, so I didn’t lose too much stuff. But I now need to reinstall a lot of programs, and some programs (like Replay) keep a count of how many times they are installed. I’m almost certain that I tested it by right-clicking and picking “start record/download now,” and it worked. Now I’m recording stuff manually with some other software, and I haven’t even reinstalled Replay AV yet. So, I guess I’ll gather my courage to set it up again, but will make sure to run it tended until I’m comfortable that it will not do that again. So the lesson to share about adapting to this new (and hopefully temporary) recording method is: Test, test, test!!!