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[Sky King]

I am having dickens of a time with audio sounds stuttering every ten or fifteen seconds on MC31 installed on a new Dell Alienware Aurora R15 computer.  The music files are hosted on a QNAP NAS connected via a 10GbE connection.  I am using Bose USB Audio (Direct Sound) as the audio device with 1.52 seconds of "skip resistance" although none of the settings within the range seem to make any difference.

When playing the same files, mostly FLAC, using VLC Media player I don't notice any skipping or stuttering whatsoever.  Any ideas where else I can look to resolve my issue?

Thanks much and have a good weekend!

[JimH]

Did you try another Audio Output?  WASAPI, for example.

[Sky King]

Hi Jim.  I set the output device to "default - WASAPI" and got an error message with a recommendation to set the output to 48k, 6 channels (I chose 5.1 because 6 wasn't an option).  It wanted me to select 32 bits but I could not find that as an option.  The sound now plays using WASAPI and I will monitor the output for stuttering and let you know how it works out.

Thank you!

[Sky King]

Jim, I tried everything I could think of doing including setting buffering to 3,000 ms, etc., and nothing seemed to stop the stuttering.  Today I happened upon an ASIO driver, ASIO4ALL v2.15, and set the driver ASIO buffer size to 1024 and the audio is playing flawlessly.

Do you think there is something else I can try within MC itself rather than have to resort to this additional ASIO driver?

Thank in advance for your thoughts.

[Awesome Donkey]

Worth pointing out that ASIO4ALL isn't actually ASIO, it's just a wrapper for kernel streaming, a very old audio component from the Windows 98 days that's been depreciated in Windows since I believe Windows Vista. It was replaced in Vista with WASAPI.

If WASAPI isn't working, make sure you're using the WASAPI output for your DAC and not the default WASAPI output. If it still pops up the error about 48 kHz it seems perhaps your DAC or whatever you're using is limited to 48 kHz? If it's a Bluetooth output, I could see that, as most Bluetooth audio outputs are limited to 48 kHz.

Screenshots of MC's Options > Audio and Audio Path while attempting playback likely would help too.

[Sky King]

Thanks for the info on what ASIO4ALL is and isn't.

The "DAC" I am using is the on-board Intel Alder Lake-S PCH (Realtek(R) controller and it can run at 24-192k.  I am using the (Realtek(R) Audio) [WASPI] audio device with the Bitdepth set to Automatic and the Buffering set to the recommended 100 ms.  "Open device for exclusive access" is also checked.

Things appear to have "settled down" for the time being and the audio seems to be stable for the time being.

[Awesome Donkey]

One thing I will mention is, in the past with Windows 11 I experienced issues with stuttering audio and whatnot, and found out it was caused by Windows Defender's Core Isolation > Memory Integrity feature being enabled. Once disabled everything went back to normal.

If that's off and it still does it, it may be worth getting LatencyMon and running it and reproducing audio stuttering to see if there's any spikes in DPC latency happening. Also likely worth updating to the latest Realtek audio drivers from Realtek's site.

[Sky King]

Turning off Core Isolation did not do anything.  I did get the free version of LatencyMon and "it" concluded that "the system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other task".  The heavy hitters appear to be involved with Microsoft's DirecTX Graphics Kernel and NVIDIA Windows kernel mode drivers.  The software's recommendation to check power management and CPU throttling settings in the OS and the bios settings did nothing.

So much for trying to acquire the latest gaming computer, Dell Alienware Aurora R15, only to find out it struggles to play music.

For now, the Realtek driver as managed by ASIO4ALL appears to play the best.