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[jphilpit]

My MC23 files sit on an external USB 3.0 drive and they play perfectly to a USB-connected digital pre-amplifier most of the time. But sometimes something I do on the PC causes a brief pause, usually 1 second or less. This activity might be just using the mouse, where I occasionally see the mouse cursor get stuck for the same amount of time that the music pauses. The pause might also occur when I start up a new program, but that's less often.

I used to be a Window programmer before I retired, so I know that the OS prioritizes all running applications for whose requests get processed first during a time of high demand. Is there anything I can do to lessen the frequency of these pauses, whether that involves changing MC's priority or anything else? These pauses are my only annoyance with MC at this point. Otherwise, it is perhaps my favorite program of all time.

[~OHM~]

I think it's a windows thing and not MC....as you don't mention what your windows 10 machine is running on I can only guess. but a weak machine would certainly cause such disturbance. You can set windows to decide what priorities should be

[jphilpit]

Yes, I do know it's a Windows issue, not an MC issue. The fact that the mouse cursor pauses at the same time that the music pauses tells me that the Windows OS has co-opted the processor to do something else. My question is whether anyone here might have already fixed this problem and is willing to share the steps required to do so.

Thanks,
John

[RD James]

What are you doing when this happens?

[jphilpit]

I'm always just working on random stuff on my computer. It might occur when I try to move the mouse cursor; I see the cursor stuck in one place for maybe a second or less and the music pause for the same interval. Or it might occur when I open a new program that takes a lot of CPU cycles to open, but the mouse event is the most common.

[JimH]

Did you try an Internet search for that problem? 

Any mouse software installed?  Try uninstalling it.

A bad video driver might also cause it.

[RD James]

"Working on random stuff" is not particularly useful. I'd check task manager to see if there are any spikes in CPU activity, and what programs are causing it if there are.
Try running Latency Mon and see if it points to any misbehaving drivers: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

[~OHM~]

Yes, I do know it's a Windows issue, not an MC issue. The fact that the mouse cursor pauses at the same time that the music pauses tells me that the Windows OS has co-opted the processor to do something else. My question is whether anyone here might have already fixed this problem and is willing to share the steps required to do so.

Thanks,
John

see whats running in the background of your pc...you may find the culprit there

[Antognini]

I'm a bit surprised that Windows background activity would cause this sort of problem (I used to be a Windows kernel programmer), but only a bit surprised. Finding out what's going on (likely a driver or a service) is the obvious first step. You might check out SysInternals (part of Microsoft) tools. Another place to look are the various Windows logs.

What kind of system are you using? If, for example, it has only 1 core (usually 2 threads), that might explain something.

If you could switch your external drive to a different USB hub, that might help.

(I hope that since MC can be told to watch for library changes, MC doesn't use "polling" to keep track of the state of the music library. That's a very crude technique for monitoring storage.)

[~OHM~]

I have seen applications running in the background do this. antivirus is most commonly the culprit but get enough unnecessary bloat ware going and test it yourself!