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[Rands]

I've used ASIO on three different cards now:  Audigy 1, Revo 7.1, and now an Audigy 2 ZS.  Here's the issues I've noticed:

Last Song Not Finishing:  Unless the play mode is set to repeat, the last song in a play list will usually be cut off anywhere from a few to as much as 10 or more seconds.   I only use gapless playback, so perhaps it has something to do with the buffering for that and, upon finding no more tracks, it cuts out?  This happens with all three cards.

Network Stuttering:  When buffering a stream or when moving around a song on a networked drive or when jumping to another song on a network drive, MC will sometimes stutter the last half-second of music endlesly until either the stream stops buffering or the song starts playing again.  This only happens with the Audigy cards.

Is anyone else experiencing issues such as these?

[Marko]

yup. you and a lot of others.

rightly or wrongly, this will be either ignored, or blamed on soundcard drivers. I say wrongly for me, because, it used to work flawlessly, only MC has changed on this system, but still, drivers get the blame??
Slowly but surely all the things that actually worked are being either broken or removed in the name of the "big deal" and it's a crying shame.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I have this gut-feeling that MC is heading in a direction most of us regular interactors will simply not follow it.
 

[zevele10]

we are two on the boat

[Matt]

Can you report what the diagnostics show if you turn them on in Options > Playback?

[Rands]

Device: Creative ASIO (0 channel shift)
Buffer Type: 16 (2400 samples)
Output Format: 48000 khz - 2 channels
Post Output Ready: 1

[Marko]

here's mine....


I click OK, then MC crashes leaving the buffer hammering away. No way to stop it. Gotta reboot.

My soundcard's an SB Audigy Player running under the latest XP drivers from Creative.

-marko.

[JimH]

Even though the driver is new, it still could be the problem.

[Matt]

I just tried ASIO on two machines here with two different cards, and couldn't reproduce the problems.

Any more hints?

[Marko]

Matt, thanks for looking.

For me, I'm convinced it's wma codec related. Remember the period where they weren't included in the installer? Well, prior to that, and during that, I had no problems at all. The problems arose after they were added back into the installer with the message along the lines of "windows media player no longer required", and have never gone away. Beyond that, I've no idea. Nothing is written in the event logs.
It was also around this time that wma streaming began to get a bit whacked out if that's any help at all.

[Matt]

Have you tried different file types, output sample rates, driver settings, MC output settings, etc.?

[Mike Noe]

I am using the RME Digi96/8 PST and while I haven't seen the problems you list, I have seen other similar problems, but fiddling with the settings for the card driver and MC have solved most of the problems ( other problems are related to the fact that my machine is performance-challenged).

RME recommends the following:
System sounds turned off
"Background Processes" as the performance setting
RME card is _not_ the preferred device
Use 24-bit resolution for best performance

The RME has the ability select hardware buffer size and interface resolution (16 or 32 bit).  This will affect latency depending on sample rate from the application (MC in this case).

I have found that setting the buffer on the RME to 1024 (32bit) and setting the buffer in MC to 1.56 seconds seems to give me the best overall performance (given the above setup info).

It appears that MC retrieves the buffer size from the hardware driver rather than providing a generic setting.  Not sure if I completely grasp the relationship.

Perhaps you have these types of options on your sound card/ASIO driver setup?

[Rands]

For the network stuttering problem, I've tried different combinations of ASIO settings to no avail.  In fact, most of what I did seemed to make it worse from MC10's default settings.  I tried using Direct Sound and WaveOut and got many of the same issues though far less frequently.

Switching to WaveOut or Direct Sound output fixes the problem of final songs in a playlist getting cut off.

What else should I try to get this problem resolved?

[Rands]

I also discovered the stuttering occurs when searching through a track on a CD.  

[Matt]

Wish we could reproduce these problems.

I can say that I had a card that stuttered once, and the only thing that fixed it was turning off IRQ Steering. (need to disable ACPI)  It was a hardware level stutter, and happened with every program.

Sorry we're not more help.  Let us know if you figure anything else out.

[Rands]

I'll try testing it against other programs and see where that goes.  If I don't get the same results with Winamp or WMP, then should I assume it is not a hardware problem?

[KeystoneCop]

This is a shot in the dark, but it worked for me.

Move the card to the top slot.   sorry to waste your time if it dosn't work.

[sapnho]

I have the same problem as described here. I am using a Terratec 6fire. No problems with Winamp and ASIO so it must bei MC related I guess. I was also told to change drivers but since things work well with Winamp, there must be another fix. When I deactivate ASIO, the problem is gone.

[Lynn]

Hi,

I have had the same problems with an RME Digi96 audio card designed specifically for digital I/O, including ASIO interfaces.

The only program that has experienced these types of buffering problems is MC.  

Marco is also on to something about the WMA change.  Prior to the larger distribution of these components, I did not experience the problems.  That is why I continue to run on 9.0.180 (and have paid for the 10.0 upgrade in hopes this might be fixed one day).

BTW, a similar problem exists with Wave out by simply uping the buffer to 5 seconds.  MC will stutter trying to catch up with the buffering at the beginning of the play list.  

So, I suspect that both problems are related to how MC buffers data and some type of MC threading issue.  The buffer issue becomes worse when the WMA components are in the mix.

I have tried other programs, like using Winamp and an ASIO plugin, and have not experienced the issue.  This, and the fact that many different hardware/driver configurations are experiencing the problem, leads me to believe that it is not driver related, but a problem in MC.

Also, it is not simply a load issue, since CPU on my dedicated music server is usually 0-4% load, and never above 15%.

Regards,
Lynn

[Rands]

I've tried to recreate the issues with Winamp 2 and 5 as well as WMP8 (I refuse to install WMP9).  I am forced to believe that the issue is solely with MC.

[thomaspf]

While you guys have some attention on ASIO driver problems I add on my issues as well.

I have a couple of M-audio cards that are all working fine with ASIO output but so far I have not been able to get this working with the Echo Indigo PCcard in my laptop.

By using the ASIOcaps tool I found out that this driver only implements a 32bit interface and I managed to get this to work in foobar when I convert the output format to 32bits.

With MC it goes into waiting/buffering and then MC crashes.

Any ideas?

Cheers

    Thomas

[thomaspf]

I found a solution to the Echo Indigo ASIO problem that will also allow many more cards with WDM drivers to bypass kmixer with Media Center.

Someone on the avsforum posted a link to a ASIO2KS shim driver that exposes an ASIO driver over any kernel streaming compliant WDM driver.

http://www.asio2ks.de/

That driver is currently limited to 16 bits but this is exactly what I needed.

Cheers

    Thomas