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Announcements not playing after 2.10 update


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13 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

yes, got the advice i posted

 

If that's the official answer, that's a cop out.  If there are multiple people with this problem, especially if it's sporadic or intermittent, support needs to take this more seriously.   I am really getting tired of "delete and reinstall" as being the go to answer rather than finding and fixing the root cause.  In some cases delete and reinstall is an annoyance.  But where there is significant rework or reprogramming involved it's a serious issue that C4 support doesn't seem to care about.  It's even worse when support says wipe your controller and start over.

(not blaming you in any way Mitch)

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Data corruption and rebuilding announcements is last resort.  There are also a few other things to consider. 

-Check the start delay, sometimes increasing it to 500MS can help depending on how many rooms the announcement is playing through.

-Make sure all rooms that have the announcements have a valid digital audio path.  This will cause a timeout after the announcement for up to 5 minutes if rooms are included in the announcement that does not have a valid path..  (this is being addressed so the rooms cannot be added if they do not have a valid path).

If your dealer is still unable to solve, yes, please call into tech support.  They will be able to diagnose with any known issues and fixes.

 

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4 minutes ago, thegreatheed said:

How is support supposed to handle it? They've identified the problem, I'm sure it's been reported internally, and they are giving you the known workaround or fix. Support is not going to delve into the system files and fix the faulty code... that's not their job!

 

If support says "it's a known issue and we are working on a fix" that's one thing.  I expect that support would ask for the relevant log files that would show what happened at the time of the problem or provide instructions on how that info could be gathered.  

 

If it's a known issue, I want to know and possibly have some idea of when it might be fixed.  If it's not a known issue, tell me whether you are accepting it as a bug (or going to do further research) or you want new to track something and report if it happens again.

I ran an I/T support organization for many years - this isn't rocket science.

 

And, when something is fixed or a problem/case file is closed, tell the dealer that opened the problem.  I just found out by chance that the media scanning problem i and others encountered after moving to 2.10 has been fixed.  I'm glad it's been fixed, but it would be nice to know.

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13 minutes ago, Derrick Cain said:

Data corruption and rebuilding announcements is last resort.  There are also a few other things to consider. 

-Check the start delay, sometimes increasing it to 500MS can help depending on how many rooms the announcement is playing through.

-Make sure all rooms that have the announcements have a valid digital audio path.  This will cause a timeout after the announcement for up to 5 minutes if rooms are included in the announcement that does not have a valid path..  (this is being addressed so the rooms cannot be added if they do not have a valid path).

If your dealer is still unable to solve, yes, please call into tech support.  They will be able to diagnose with any known issues and fixes.

 

 

Thanks Derrick.

How does the data corruption happen?  I would think playing announcements is pretty much read/only.  I haven't had audio files disappear or get corrupted in 4 years.  Of course, when this problem happens can't tell if it's because the file can't be read or can't be played. Fortunately, rebooting the controller corrected whatever the issue is, at least this time.

In my case all zones have a valid digital audio path and the config hasn't changed in a number of releases.

can you expand on the use of the start delay?  What is the purpose of a start delay and what does increasing it do?  How many is many rooms?  More than 2? 4? 8?

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19 minutes ago, Derrick Cain said:

Just to add, please avoid using HDMI as an audio path with distributed audio.  This can cause added latency.

Is this an issue even if an announcement is never played to a zone where the audio source is HDMI?

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@jfh

The start delay is what it sounds like.  It will delay the file from start for 0-1000 MS.  We don't have a baseline of how many rooms you should be using that, but we wanted there to be an adjustment if the user was experiencing issues where the beginning of the file might be cut off or distorted.  We have that option to "fine tune".

4 minutes ago, jfh said:

Is this an issue even if an announcement is never played to a zone where the audio source is HDMI?

This is more referring to the audio output of a controller.  If you have an EA-5 with HDMI as a valid path for a room (HDMI into an HDMI matrix, down mixed into an amp/audio matrix), HDMI will be selected as a valid path.  This is why there is an option on the EAs to disable HDMI audio.  HC controllers can disable HDMI audio with a path setter driver.

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27 minutes ago, Derrick Cain said:

@jfh

The start delay is what it sounds like.  It will delay the file from start for 0-1000 MS.  We don't have a baseline of how many rooms you should be using that, but we wanted there to be an adjustment if the user was experiencing issues where the beginning of the file might be cut off or distorted.  We have that option to "fine tune".

Ok, but if announcements are working as expected, there is no need to increase the delay, right?  

And if we experience missing audio for an announcement that hasn't changed on paths that haven't changed increasing the delay isn't expected to "fix" anything?

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17 minutes ago, thegreatheed said:

Control4 never gives timelines. They don't pre-announce products (mostly) and they don't promise a timeline on bug fixes. It's been that way and that has been their answer for as long as I remember.

 

Fair enough.  I understand the issues with preannouncements or timelines.

But they should still be able to say if they consider it a bug to be fixed and when they do fix it (and the code is available) tell the person who reported the problem (and anyone on the interested parties list).  Are you telling me that C4 support doesn't have a problem report or ticketing system?

 

This problem is not unique to C4 support.  Some driver developers have the same "no feedback to the reporter" problem.  That's just poor customer service which wastes time and resources on both sides.

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You can request to be notified, but bug fixes pretty much happen with OS releases, so, you just update when it comes out. When your platform includes a ton of different services, running on all kinds of different hardware, 'little' bug fixes can sometimes cause big issues. So, Control4 does larger OS releases where things can be extensively tested (even still bugs happen).

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1 hour ago, Derrick Cain said:

Yes.  My recommendations are for people having issues with announcements in 2.10.  If you're announcements are working fine, more than likely you can skip over the thread, and have no reason to call a dealer about them. :)

 

Well, not sure what category I'm in.  They were working fine for a couple months until two days ago, then they stopped working one by one.  I rebooted the controller and they started working again.  Now I'm worried that they may stop working again and the fix may require me to recreate all the announcements and related programming. :( 

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I just finished pretty big project.. wanted to have "spotify" and stuff... system has 2.9.1, I called tech support and asked about known issues and I was told

1. announcement might stop working ( I have 2 doorstations)

2. lighting scenes issues 

So I left system with 2.9.1. At least it works stable

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19 minutes ago, thegreatheed said:

You can fix the lighting scenes by hitting 1 button in Composer. full stop.

 

See, there was an issue, support found a resolution, and communicated it.

What is the 1 button?  And what issue does it fix?

 

 

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1 minute ago, Don Applegate said:

I have been told that an update will be coming today that will address this issue.


I was also given an answer as to what the cause was but my phone cut out in the middle of the explanation.   it had something to do with the audio end points in each room

Is this an automatic update or is a dealer needed to update?

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