There is very little chance that the conversion itself is the source of the problem. If the sequence works once, the conversion was successful and the data in the file is correct. RJ posted the file format of that data stream a year and a half ago, and it is very straightforward. No magic numbers, no gap, just a stream of 0s and 1s that are read from the file and sent to the pixelnet 'network'.
My setup has been working for the past 10 days, is ON 24/7 (but only 'broadcasting from 6pm to 10pm) and had not failed once. I said 'had' because last night it showed the exact same symptoms than yours. First time around 7.30pm, I noticed than the yard was dark, but I could still hear the song being played in my office where I have a radio tuned to my radio channel. I ran outside, checked the first hub, the one connected to the conductor, checked the second one and so forth. All had power and I couldn't see anything wrong. Went back inside, switched the pixelnet cable from the conductor to a etherdongle I have there, launched a playback in LSP and the lights were all working fine. The song on the conductor had changed at that point, and when I reconnected the hub to the conductor, the show was playing correctly. About 2 hours later, the same thing happened. I didn't touch anything that time, and everything came back to normal when it went to the next song. That second failure happened on a different song.
It might be the case that this happened in the past, but I had not seen it up until yesterday.
This is a new conductor that was built this season, and the memory card I am using is not the one coming with a coop, as I could not find it locally. It is a 16Gb CF card, speed 500x from Monster. All the files have been triple checked to be at the correct format, password, schedule and show files are present on the card, and at no time has the conductor showed any signs of problem. I was using another one last season, which wasn't mine, and the new one performed exactly like the old one.
One thing that was done earlier that day and prior to experiencing that issue, was to delete the show file and the schedule file (directly from the card) and rebuild a new set. While doing this, I noticed a 'playlist.dat' which I do not remember seeing before, and, not knowing what it was, I didn't touch it.
What type of CF card are you using, and does anyone know what the expected behavior when the conductor encounters an error in the middle of streaming a .seq file?
Another question, for RJ if he is available, is there a way to set the default output volume value to something else than 214 and have it stick? 214 ends up being extremely low with my conductor, and unless I set it at 254 I can barely hear anything (with the FM transmitter or a headphone directly plugged in the conductor). That isn't too much of a problem to have to set it manually at 254, but the annoying thing is that, when the CPP is relaunched, it always default to 214, regardless of what the previous setting was.