Number 211 - December 2000

MP3s, USB CD Writers and Renegade Programs
by William LaMartin, July 2000 Bits of Blue, Tampa PCUG
It has been an interesting month of computer problems. Some months are like that. The previous month almost nothing happened of interest. June was a different matter. And much of it can be traced to the MP3 download craze.     MP3, Napster & Gnutella are words we didn't know only a short time back. Now they appear often in the computer news (see Tim Condon's article in this [Bits of Blue] newsletter), the regular news, and in what is not a good omen, the legal news. I don't intend on touching on the legality of sharing recordings in the MP3 format via the Internet by using Napster and Gnutella. I will leave that to the courts to hash out. As for me, I only got involved to figure out what it was all about so as to help someone with their request. You know, "I tried it, but I didn't inhale".     It all started with a request from someone I help to tell them how to turn music in the MP3 format that they had downloaded from the Internet using Napster into music on a CD that they could play in any CD player. It ended with many hours of work getting a CD Writer to write without freezing on their computer and getting Visual Basic (VB) and Microsoft Access to again work correctly on my computer. If you don't see the connection, well, that's what the article is about.     HP USB CD Writer - First things first. I told them to go buy an internal HP CD Writer, any of several that I had chosen from the HP site on the Internet. And I would come over and install it. Then if the software that came with this new drive wouldn't do what we wanted we would see about getting the appropriate software.     The next day, I went to their house and opened the box of an HP 9300i CD Writer. Having installed similar devices before, I put the software CD in the computer and ran the program to let it tell me which IDE connector was free--and then it hit me. My problem was not in finding which IDE connection to use. My problem was that this $4,000 Dell computer only had two 5.25" drive bays, and both were taken, one with the DVD/CD drive and the other with an HP Colorado tape drive. Another reason to buy a large tower case.     Back to the drawing board and back to CompUSA for the client, a trip which produced an HP 8200e CD Writer which connects via a USB connection. Since there was already a USB printer and a USB device for connecting a digital camera, I also requested a USB hub.     The USB CD writer installed easily, as did the accompanying software, which included Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 3.5 (they do not give you the most recent version with the drives). Everything seemed to work OK, but we couldn't put any of the MP3 files on the CDs being made because the MP3 files need to be converted to .wav files before Easy CD Creator 3.5 will make an audio CD of them.     When I got home later, I went on the Internet and found several shareware programs that claimed to create audio CDs directly from MP3 files. My client downloaded one of these and tried it. Unfortunately the program would not work. In talking with a friend, he suggested a program called, I think, EarJam that he had just found that came highly recommended and which was freeware. He sent all 10 MB of it to me, and I installed it on my computer before he even got it installed on his.     This is where my problems probably started, for as the program installed, I saw a message that said it was installing some sort of data components. I think it possibly said something about DAO. "Uh Oh", I thought. That isn't good. I bet that messes up something. Furthermore, why does a music CD creation program need to use a database. I think the answer to this is that the program also had some sort of marketing angle and would probably keep track of what music you turned into CDs.     Anyway, the program never got past the first track on making a CD on either my computer or my friend's. So I uninstalled it, but made a mental note to watch out for database problems. Next day a bit of research revealed that Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 4.0 (I had only 3.5) would do exactly what was needed--go directly from MP3 files to audio tracks on a CD. So the client bought it, installed it, and had problems. It would never get more than two or three tracks written before the program would freeze.     I arrived, checked out the problem and noted that the error message was: "A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C14F38DD in VXD APIX (01) +....." A reinstallation of the program didn't help. After running out of ideas, I called Adaptec (this was the big mistake in all of this--not because of anything bad about Adaptec help, but because their program was not the problem). I spent several hours on the phone with a very nice fellow doing all sorts of things: renaming files, deleting files, taking everything out of the startup section of the Windows Configuration except Systray and Explorer, slowing down the Video Card, writing at 2 speed, 1 speed, etc. All to no avail. I went home with the promise from him that he would send me two utilities to check and then update the ASPI layer. I bet you didn't know your computer had one.     Next day they had no record of our long session, and we are assigned another tech. A couple of hours with him, and we mutually agree that Adaptec can't solve the problem with their Easy CD Creator 4.0 not	being able to write to more than a few tracks. But that error message concerning the APIX.VXD certainly pointed to them.     I had also moved the USB connection for the CD Writer to a direct connection to the USB port on the computer instead of the hub, thinking that might help. But it didn't.     My next try was the correct one. - Many hours too late, I called HP! In describing our travails and attempts at correction I also mentioned that we had a USB printer and a USB hub connected to the computer. "I bet it is the printer", the HP tech said. "It most probably generates USB traffic at random times and that traffic causes the CD Writer to freeze". I knew better than to try and use any USB device or to plug or unplug any USB device while the CD Writer was creating a CD, but I never dreamed that you couldn't have another USB device plugged in.     However, before we tried his theory, he also wanted to rename and delete a bunch of files to be on the safe side. Apparently there are a lot of files that are installed by other software for devices, scanners, ZIP drives, etc. that also use the Adaptec ASPI layer that aren't removed or updated properly when newer versions are installed.     After about 45 minutes of playing with files, we were ready to make a CD--with all other USB devices unplugged. Ten tracks of ten attempted were successfully written at 4x speed.     So much time wasted in looking for a solution in the wrong place. I then sent an email to the Adaptec technician for whom I had a email address since he had sent me the two files, and a day later he responded that he had used that information to help someone who hadn't been able to use his HP USB CD Writer for 10 days since purchasing it--and who, I might add, had also called Adaptec instead of HP.     By the way, the printer, while connected--even if it were turned off--would cause a freeze in the CD creation process.     Access and VB - Several days after installing that freeware CD writing program on my computer, I needed to print out the mailing labels for the June newsletter to be assembled the next morning. I kept getting error messages in Access, but they didn't make much sense. Nothing had changed since last month to speak of, and I couldn't figure it out.     So I finally exported my data and brought it into another machine and used Access there to print the labels. I then noted that I couldn't run certain queries on my regular machine, and would instead get the error message "Function Isn't Available in Expressions in Query Expression" with the problem function described. I did a search of Microsoft and came up with the article http://support.microsoft.com/ support/ kb/ articles/ Q194/3/74.ASP. I used their first method mentioned to easily fix the problem. I strongly suggest that those of you who use Access go and read the article. Quite possibly you may need it sometime. I am convinced the problem was caused by installing the program mentioned.     About a week later I opened a VB project that I written months back and not looked at in the past month or so. When I tried to run it I got the message: "Compile error: Error in loading DLL". The program used DAO database components and I immediately suspected that same program. I assumed that some of the DLLs used by my program had been either corrupted or were the wrong version. I spun my wheels a lot as usual looking at the DLLs, checking their versions, etc. And I found one that was highly suspect, since its version description was "MSVCRT40.dll version: 4.20-OS use only. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE". That wasn't good, and I replaced it with the one on my laptop and registered it. Neither that nor a lot of other ideas solved the problem. Of course, I could reinstall VB along with its two service packs, but VB didn't appear to be the problem. Projects that didn't use the Recordset property of the DAO Data control ran fine.     I contacted Microsoft via email and exchanged several messages over the next few days--all to no avail. Then I got the idea of exporting the problem VB project--which I had now refined down to a very simple one with only the Data Control and three lines of code--to my laptop. The project, of course, worked fine there within VB. But now I created an installation package for it and sent this package back to other computer, where I installed it as a stand alone program. Surprise, the packaged program ran fine, whereas it would not run from within the VB environment. I was hoping that this would correct what I still thought was a problem on the main computer with the DLLs the program used. But when I tried again to run the project from within VB I got the same error.     Finally, it dawned on me that the problem was not with the DLLs the project used but rather with some DLL that VB needed to implement the Data Control. So VB did need to be installed, something that anyone but myself and the Microsoft tech. would probably have done in the first place.     A reinstallation of VB solved the problem. Well, I was finally made whole after my excursion in to the world of MP3s.
Number 211 - December 2000