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[cFortC]

With current update of MC 27 I am hearing occasional short pauses (less than 1/4 second) in playback of audio files. I tried increasing the buffer time and finally went to staging the entire file into memory for playback. Still experiencing the occasional pauses, very roughly from two to six per hour.

I have now heard this on two PCs - the larger one (where I'm listening now) has a 3.6GHz Xeon E5-1620 processor (4 core, 8 threads) and 32GB main memory. The concurrent load is very light for this machine: just MS Office and Firefox browser. The pauses happen at random and are not correlated with other activity (e.g. launching an app etc.).

Whenever a pause happened, I moved the play pointer back a minute or so to replay the passage - the pause is not there the second time, indicating a playback issue of a valid file.

It is getting rather irritating - and seems to be a new behavior of MC 27 in that past week or few weeks. Any ideas? I'm willing to take troubleshooting steps and send in the results.

[JimH]

Are the files on a local drive?  Or USB or NAS?

Did you configure Windows Defender?

[David Sydney]

This has also happened to me before when my Media drive is local but a RAID 5 drive that has degraded and is trying to rebuild itself... Initially without me having Intel RST loaded so I could see what it was doing. Took me many other trial and error paths before I discovered it.

Sometimes windows/defender throws in something that has caused it for me back in Jan. make sure windows update is current. Hope this helps.

David

[cFortC]

Thanks for these comments.

The files are on a local NAS (non-mirrored SSD storage devices). All of the NAS backup activities are scheduled for middle-of-the-night when the PCs are idle. Anyhow, since I'm now using the "Load full file (not decoded) into memory" option I was hoping NAS issues wouldn't be involved.

I've never observed a single interaction between any Windows firewall and Media Center. I'm currently running Windows 10 20H2 with all current security updates. For feature updates I stay on the conservative path to allow others to do Beta testing for Microsoft.

I will try "Load decoded file into memory" option for awhile and see if that helps.

[JimH]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,114101.0.html

[cFortC]

Well, that didn't take too long to fail.

So I have re-installed the final version of MC 26 (it was the easier to locate this download than an earlier release of MC 27).

I will work with this MC 26 for a while and post back whether the "short pauses" continue to occur. I have reverted to "No memory playback" since that is the default and where the issue started showing up for me.

[cFortC]

Thanks for the link to the Windows Defender adjustments. I will defer on Windows Defender for the moment since I am hopeful that I am on the trail of the issue.

Suspicions moved to the USB output side of things so I first ran something called DPC Latency Checker which flagged a problem with the built-in Intel network adapter (it had DPC latency in the 4ms range). I switched the machine's network connection over to a Broadcom PCIe network adapter already installed - that one's DPC latency always stays under 1ms. This seemed to stifle the drop-outs for a while.

Then a drop-out finally happened. I've been running LatencyMon in the background and it reports encountering "Highest measured interrupt to process latency" of 3376 microseconds. This is enough to trigger LatencyMon's warning that my machine will likely experience buffer underruns.

The problem is, it didn't identify the driver or ISR responsible for this latency measurement. Any tips on useful follow-up troubleshooting?

[Matt]

You could try increasing the buffering in Options > Audio.

[cFortC]

I did increase the ASIO device buffering (Playback Options => Device Settings) from the default 50ms to 500ms. I've tried this on a couple PCs and with a couple USB DACs and haven't heard a stutter since. Perhaps there still is an audio stutter rate like once a month, but I can live with that given the design limitations of Windows OS.