This is my first post to this forum, so hello everyone

So I'm having an issue with Acid Pro. Up until about 2 weeks ago, Acid was working fine. Then for some reason, it started crashing on the splash screen. It always stops on "Initializing External Monitor Interface."

Does anyone know what could be causing this? I've reinstalled, totally removing the Acid folder in Program Files and deleting everything in Acid's AppData folder. Also tried renaming my VST folder so it couldn't scan for VSTs, nothing worked.

I tried Shift+Ctrl when starting Acid, which I had read was supposed to prompt me to reset Acid's preferences, but I wasn't. Could this possibly point to a problem?

I have no idea what's going on lol.

If anyone has any idea what could be causing this, it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/Forums/ShowMessage.asp?F orum=4&MessageID=684960

Vegas Pro - Video

Subject: "Initializing external monitoring"

May be similar to your own issue.

Google gave me nothing other than someone else having the same problem 3 years ago with no solution. There was a vegas thread that came up too, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it so not sure it's relevant.

Thanks for the quick reply everyone.

I'm in the same place as you hibidy lol. I've been googling for about a week now and only found Vegas related threads that I couldn't (as you said) make heads or tails of. There seems to be very little relating to Acid in any form on the internet. Odd.

Aloysius, sadly I had already come across that thread. To my knowledge, I don't have media manager installed (it used to be an extra download...was this changed in 7.0e?). I tried searching around, but couldn't find anywhere a place where Acid stored its preferences. Could you point me in that direction?

Some interesting stuff here at KvR:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=297217

One quick quote:



If you 'clean out' these files, you may be back in business. Make sure to read through the Thread properly (unlike me). I just did a quick google search ...

Nope, still didn't work. I deleted the entire Sony folder in AppData\Local (Acid is the only Sony program I have installed), uninstalled Acid, deleted the Program Files folder again, reinstalled, and...still crashes on the splash screen.

One thing I have noticed though. When I do a totally fresh install, the splash screen says "Initializing External Monitor Interface" when the load bar is about 2/3 of the way done. However, if I re-run the program after that, "Initializing External Monitor Interface" pops up with the load bar at the very end. It loads all of the same stuff the 2nd time around...dunno what's with this.

Just throwing out some more info in the vain hope it could help point toward a problem, haha.

Hmm ...

There has to be a logical explanation. I'll be damned if I know what it is.

I'll be an idiot and suggest reaper. Might have already tried it but the demo is unprincipled so it's worth a look. Not a solution, just an alternative.

There does indeed.

I've tried Reaper in the past (and in fact, after Acid stopped working I decided to give it another shot), and it was pretty good. From what I've seen it's similar to Acid, so I might just end up switching over for now. Currently I'm waiting for my external drive to get here so I can back up all my files and do a fresh reinstall of Windows, since I'm assuming somewhere along the line I installed some sort of drivers that Acid just doesn't agree with.

In the meantime though, if anyone has any ideas, I would be more than happy to try them, haha.

Thanks everyone for your help

P.S.: I have now installed Media Manager to see if that did anything (as a bs lead I got from the thread here on KvR); didn't change.

Media Manager loads fine though.

Dusted off my old Acid Pro 6 disc, installed that...guess what?

Acid Pro 6 crashes at "Initializing external monitor interface" too.

So what does Acid 6 and Acid 7 share? What is the "external monitor interface"? What initializes it? If we can figure this out I think we might be able to find the source of the problem.

Something I've been wondering: is the "external monitor interface" what Acid would show on an external monitor if I had one connected, or is it the virtual interface for Acid to monitor external programs/files/etc? Because I don't have an external monitor connected right now, but I had at one point and had some weird graphics card errors with it wanting to only connect to the external monitor (I did manage to fix this, as far as I can tell, by installing beta drivers for my graphics card)...I don't know if that's connected at all.

Baffling. You do have all that net. crap installed right? (I remember acid being particular about that)

Yep. Like I said, Acid was working flawlessly a few weeks ago, and I haven't done anything silly and uninstalled any .NET stuff.

Mind whirling. Might try downgrading my graphics card drivers to see if that does anything.

Though if I remember, it stopped working just before I even installed the new drivers. Dunno, desperate for solutions at this point.

Here's a guess. There's a load of preferences written into your registry. Things that don't get uninstalled when you uninstall the program.

If I was having no luck with Support or on the Internet, this is where I'd start looking.

Stab in the dark. But try restoring Windows to the date it worked and check what happens. Recently there were a couple of OS updates (assuming automatic updates are on your system) and maybe some this is the reason. I recall that I had a similar issue in the past with AP6. Can't rememeber how I resolved it though. But this is what I would do.

Actually I would skip AP7 as a tool as it's a very problematic (based on my 3-4 years marrieage with AP) platform with little or no (in some cases) support from the dev.

As I liked the idea and workflow of acid I found that Studio One is the closest host in terms of the workflow. I would strongly recommend trying it.

Good luck!

OKAY.

Turned on my computer today...

Acid starts up perfectly fine.

What I'm going to assume was the fix was reinstalling .NET 3.5. As Acid was loading today, I saw something that it hadn't said before: Loading .NET framework (I just kind of assumed it did this in the background without mention in the loading screen).

I guess something screwy happened with something I installed that overwrote the previous .NET framework incorrectly.

Thank you everyone for your help!

Have a great day

~solved~