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Topic: Short breaks in music playback (Read 4241 times) previous topic - next topic
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Short breaks in music playback

Hello!

I experience problems when playing back music from my harddisc.
Im using an acer win 7 laptop with an intel i5 processor and a fairly fast 7200 turns hdd.
When I use foobaar (or, i guess, any other player) from time to time little "breaks" appear, the sound stops for a moment up to 1 or 2 seconds.
My hdd ist not very full, I use an external focusrite interface which works perfectly when e.g. making music via. ableton: There does this phenonemon never appear.
I guess it has to do somehow with the hdd but I really cant figure out what.

Thanks for your help
Chris

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #1 –
Can be anything e.g. a anti-virus software polling the internet for updates with a high priority.
You might try the Windows Resource Monitor or DPC Latency Checker to find out what process is periodically hogging the system.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #2 –
How long ago did you watch the degree of fragmentation of your HDD? A bad fragmentation of a HDD may considerably disturb sound and video operations.

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #3 –
Search out sites on optimizing a PC for audio. Setup needs to be different than for most other uses.

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #4 –
Quote from: AndyH-ha on
Search out sites on optimizing a PC for audio. Setup needs to be different than for most other uses.

Ideally, a separate “physical” (not virtual) HDD, regularly optimized, when inactive, too, is recommended for video&audio operations. A solution not affordable for everyone.
But a well done, frequently enough, optimization (full defragmentation, including free space + registry cleaning) improves considerably the stability of continuous processes on any HDD.

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #5 –
Could be caused by power management settings allowing a HDD to spin down. In my experience it can even be caused by a drive that the music isn't even stored on "waking up" from standby. It can cause noticeable short pauses in other types of applications also, but one might not think much of it until something very obvious like audio interruption occurs.

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #6 –
Creating system restore points can cause this problem with later versions of Windows (Vista and 7) since it almost copies the whole system and documents.

When you update your drivers or change certain hardware, the Windows Experience Index performs benchmarks automaticly. This causes heavy use of the hard drive and higher latency when its running.

Also foobar2000 buffers more with Mp3s to improve the accuracy of the stream, this might be related to the possible power managment issue that trout suggested.
"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"
 

Short breaks in music playback

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Robocopchris on
When I use foobaar (or, i guess, any other player) from time to time little "breaks" appear, the sound stops for a moment up to 1 or 2 seconds.

I've had that issue before, it's usually a bad soundcard
EAC>1)fb2k>LAME3.99 -V 0 --vbr-new>WMP12 2)MAC-Extra High