Good day,
Human memory being what it is I am thinking back through the years of experience using Zara V1.6.2, and cannot recall any situatioin that will cause the program to freeze in the way being described.
One test I like to use is to try to think of a way of making a reported failure happen, which might reveal the cause of such a problem. But I cannot imagine a way of making Zara freeze.
Zara has remained so popular because of its reliability, but these program failures do arise and usually our forum members eventually have a clue.
I will continue thinking about this in hopes of helping.
I recommend RadioBoss. Zara is OK for the price, but RadioBoss can do much more. We have been running RadioBoss since the fall of 2015 when our LPFM signed on. No glitches. You're right, you can't have software freezing up.
Hi Jo Ann. Can you tell me a couple of things? 1) What is the operating system (Win XP, 7, 8, 10 etc, 32- or 64-bit), 2) the hardware it is on (laptop, tower, hand-me-down etc), 3) Are you playing WAVs, MP3s, MP4s, AACs or a mix of everything?
I have a couple of ideas I'd like to offer, but can save a lot of your time and column space if I have a bit more info.
I can also recommend you plug "zara" into the Search box at the top of the web page. Lots of folks have posted Zara fix-its that may be very useful to you.
Thanks!
I haven't had issues with Zara freezing Jo Ann, but did have problems with it stuttering fairly often while playing. The problem was solved by disabling the anti-virus. As a result, the computer had to be disconnected from the internet.
Because my station runs Zara 24/7, and I wanted it to be as reliable as possible, I am running it on a laptop that has nothing installed that is not absolutely necessary for automation tasks, and with the anti-virus disabled and no connection to the internet. It has been running for several months continuously this way with no glitches at all, even when using it in live assist mode i.e. stopping it to talk on-mic, and then pressing "P" to resume playing.
Hope that helps.
I've been using Zara for my Part 15, AM TIS and LPFM with no issues other than Windows 10 annoying habit of installing updates at inoportune times.
Overall, it's been running non-stop (other than hardware problems) for years.
Seriously, Zara has been pretty much bullet proof here.
Yes, give us some more info about your problem.
After thought edit: There was an issue with playing steaming audio sources. Not always but once in a while a stream would not disengage. Zara didn't freeze but the stream would not stop when playing the next item in the list.
Are you dealing with streaming audio sources?
We have had the ZaraRadio Software stop on us also. After this happened a third time, we made a decision to switch to "RadioBoss". We thank God that we did.
Willie, what was going on when Zara failed on you?
Also, refer to the same questions I left earlier for Jo Ann: Audio formats, hardware, O/S etc...
Go with Radioboss it is really easy to use it is just like Zara with a few more features.
I had this exact same problem with Zara. I resolved it by removing AVG as my anti-virus and replacing it with PC-Matic, which I absolutley love. I was also able to get rid of MalwareBytes at the same time and have had zero problems in almost a year. I need that PC connected to the Internet because I receive some of my programming by pointing certain events to shared Dropbox folders. Yes I could do it by pointing the events to those folders on another PC on my network but this way is simpler and just as safe.
Things were rolling along in the usual way, Zara was playing the evening's programming and I was on another computer editing an audio file, but I also switched back and forth between both computers at times to accomplish things.
All of a sudden there was no audio on the radio... I wasn't sure at first what had stopped, but apparantly some button I pushed on the mouse had stopped Zara.
The Zara program did not freeze, it was still good, and I hit Play and was back in operation.
On Sunday I will try to replicate this event with specifics so we might understand what happened.