.50 Is Resource Hungry.

 

For those who want to downgrade, you will need to do an uninstall from add/remove programs before reinstalling 0.4.  Your sequences will remain intact, but you may have problems viewing any of the circle based drawing elements made in 0.5.  0.4 does not recognize the new data fields (such as radius, aspect, arcstart, arcend) added for support of these objects in 0.5.  The results may be truly bizarre so it is recommended that (if 0.5 will let you without crashing) you remove these objects from your sequence before downgrading to 0.4. 

 

For those with demo discs from TCL who do not have access to 0.4, please be patient... we will be publishing a 0.6 release very soon (within the next week).

 

For the technical types: What we have going on are some bad memory pointers in the code which are allowing data to overrun one data table and into another whenever the data being written happens to reside on a data page boundary.  Most of the time this results in simple data corruption when one table overruns into another but occasionally the page boundary is adjacent to another thread which results in an instant crash of the application (in the old days these were common causes of the General Protection Fault messages).

 

Unfortunately, due to the nature of this problem, 0.5 looked good when I gave it to the beta testers and didn't start acting up until after the release emails went out.

 

Right now for maximum playback timing accuracy Aurora takes what is available... if another program wants the CPU then Aurora will happily yield it.  At some point I will tweak this so it is not as aggressive and selfish about the CPU when it doesn't need to be (e.g. yield cycles when it is known that there are no timing events upcoming for several mS).

 

Memory and page file usage with 0.5 is abnormal however.  There is a memory management glitch that I'm working on fixing right now which will resolve this and several other reported issues.