With JRiver 20.0.131 and Windows 8.1, I experience intermittent background noise when listening to Spotify premium using the WDM driver. I have 2 zones named Player and WDM and have zone switch set up to activate WDM on Ipc input; all of this works correctly. The noise is randomly separated scrapes or clicks at about every few seconds on average. They are only moderately loud but are audible over the music. If the music is paused, the clicks stop. If I bypass the WDM driver when noise is present and play Spotify outside JRiver, the clicks are never present. When the clicks are present, they appear to be unaffected by settings of the input and output buffering, unless these are set very low, whereupon they greatly increase. Since I was never able to find a "sweet spot" for the two buffering parameters, I have the buffering parameters set at their recommended values.
Here is the maddening part. On some days or even parts of days, the playback with WDM is quiet. So far, I cannot figure out what distinguishes quiet and noisy conditions. If the clicks are on Spotify, I should hear them whether or not WDM is used. When the WDM playback is quiet, I am unable to trigger noise deliberately by surfing the net with a web browser (Firefox) or running other applications. I will next try to correlate noise clicks with CPU activity in the Task Manager, and see if anything interesting can be found. Rebooting has so far not given any consistent result.
Anyone else experiencing this particular type of noise problem? Other than the intermittent background noise, WDM is working fine for me. The zone switch is great and has made WDM much more stable; I used to crash WDM a fair bit, but not any more. The big thing now is how to diagnose the WDM problem and correlate it with something happening on the computer.