RMC vs RM for recording Pandora?

[cain]

Just something I noticed.

Some of these streams are being stored as MP3's - having 10 running at once for the last 15 minutes, two of the files are stored as MP3 with the rest as M4A.

Nothing wrong with that, just curious about Pandora's streaming behavior.

[Andy Heinlein]

About 6 months ago Pandora only streamed as MP3... they switched to M4A when the new flash player could handle the format. M4A is a lossy format, but sounds much better than MP3 at lower bitrates. So now Pandora saves tons of bandwidth by using the M4A format.

I am sure what's happening is that their whole library hasn't been converted to M4A yet, so there are still some MP3 files floating around there.

[cain]

I am sure what's happening is that their whole library hasn't been converted to M4A yet, so there are still some MP3 files floating around there.

Really good idea (on their parts) - and thank you for the insight.

By way of follow-up, I got up to 13 tabs (Firefox, Vista, 2GB RAM) with a movie downloading on Hulu.

After 15 minutes of that, my system was not so responsive - but the songs were doing pretty good. The renaming started to get backed up and occasionally failed (requiring manually performing it again.)

I backed it off to 5 and left the movie capturing. About 5-10 minutes later Media Catcher (3ß) crashed (Windows dialog with Debug-Close) - not having any of the symbols or source, best I can do is this:

Fault bucket 865800323, type 1
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: None
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: MediaCatcher.exe
P2: 3.0.0.0
P3: 489012cf
P4: ntdll.dll
P5: 6.0.6001.18000
P6: 4791a7a6
P7: c0000005
P8: 00065a20
P9:
P10:

Attached files:C:\Windows\Temp\WER9BD8.tmp.version.txt (I forgot to snag the file, I apologize, I know this is about useless.)

This also came with:

Windows detected your registry file is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded now. The applications or services that hold your registry file may not function properly afterwards.

DETAIL -
1 user registry handles leaked from \Registry\User\S-1-5-21-#####-#####-####-1000 (Looks like an Admin SID.)

And:

Faulting application MediaCatcher.exe, version 3.0.0.0, time stamp 0x489012cf, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00065a20, process id 0x124, application start time 0x01c8f294e7577508.

I'll look for the crash dump file next time, sorry.

[Andy Heinlein]

i don't think a crash dump would help.. it crashed way down in the ntdll.dll which is one of the core system dlls...

But, that diagnostic information should be sent in a help ticket.. since most people have no idea what it means

-andy.

[cain]

i don't think a crash dump would help.. it crashed way down in the ntdll.dll which is one of the core system dlls...

But, that diagnostic information should be sent in a help ticket.. since most people have no idea what it means

-andy.

I'll try and get it all together tonight and submit a comprehensive ticket.

[cain]

I've written a journal of my experience in testing these last two hours.

... and, really reproducing the "crash" - haven't done it yet. So, that's good.

A few things I have noticed, might not be bugs, maybe they are.

1. CPU spike when the MusicDNS is being used to resolve/rename the file. When there are problems with this, there are problems elsewhere.
2. Every call to rename results in additional handles and page faults. At 2 hours I have a 19MB memory footprint, 65k page faults, 4115 handles and 14 threads with 85 user objects.

I'm capturing a Hulu movie and have 10 tabs open in Firefox to Pandora.

Maybe it was something else.