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[boliver]

In the Options, I have the buffer set to 5 second but I still am getting drop out of music about once an hour.

Any suggestions about what to try on my system to solve this? (I assume this IS NOT the fault of Media Center but thought that readers here might have solved a similar problem)

I didn't have this problem on my earlier media PC. 

I upgraded this PC to a state of the art X48 Intel board with a 4 core processor.  The board also have 10 (!) USB connections.  And the music is being created by connection by USB to a Creative Extigy unit and then digitally sent to an outboard DAC.  I don't actually use the Extigy music outputs:  just the digital pass-through. (There is a direct digital out on the board but I couldn't control volume when I used that output:  Creative seems to have drivers for software based volume control which I want/need)

Any ideas of what to do?  (I have already tried moving the usb connections around a bit randomly but I don't know enough about Windows to do this intelligently)

ANY help would be appreciated!

Bill

[vbrook]

I'm far from an MC expert, but I do work in digital audio.

There is a program you might find helpful called DPC Latency Checker: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

It will display latency in real time, a bit like an hospital EKG machine. The Y-axis is latency, measured in microseconds. It's designed for digital audio/video and will also supply a running commentary about how well your system will handle things.

Anyway, when the graph spikes, hopefully there will be some correlation with your audio drop outs. You can then experiment and try and find the source of the problem. Indeed, I would expect MC is not the problem, and certainly your processor speed is not, either. Sometimes, the cause is a fan, an optical drive, another USB or Firewire device; the networking (esp. a wireless connection)... Perhaps you could try an ASIO driver, as well, instead of your current driver, if your setup will support it. (I believe MC does have ASIO support.)

Hope that helps!

[boliver]

Thanks!  I'm playing with the program right now and it is telling me some driver is not behaving nicely...  :-)

[boliver]

This latency program is MADDENING.

No matter what I do, I always have about a 1000 micro second latency about once every other second.  (On the alternative seconds the latency is almost zero)  I've removed just about every process an ever device from the system.

What could it be?  1000 micro seconds is "OK" from the point of view of the program, but then if I do ANYTHING on the machine - open a program, move a window etc, the added work pushes the 1000 micro second spike into 4000 micro second territory...

My drives are all brand new 1 TB and are running using the AHCI interface as set in bios.

[JimH]

Virus checker?

[boliver]

I completely removed AVG anti-virus.  That was the first thing I did...  :-)

Actually, by removing it, the drop outs in the music diminished consierably so it was definitely a problem too.

But, no, now the system has no virus checker (but Windows Firewall is on)

[JimH]

Local drive?  Or USB drive, NAS, etc.?

Disconnect anything you can.

[boliver]

I disconnected all external drives and even disabled the USB bus from the bios. (!)

This is just crazy.  I ran the latency program on another machine here (my laptop) and got very low latency so something is definitely wrong.

This bad machine is absolutely top of the line and new.

[DarkPenguin]

You might want to update drivers.

Have you moved the files to a new disk?  (If you have more than one.)  Or add them to a usb device.  See if they play well.

[JimH]

Try disconnecting it from the network.

Then turn the firewall off.

Look for any unused devices in Control Panel/System.

Did you look in the Weird Problems thread?

You're making progress now.

[JimH]

Here's an example of what you'll find in the Weird Problems thread.  It was an Nvidia video driver problem.  Just an example.

[vbrook]

Just a thought, but if you plug headphones directly into your interface (soundcard), does the problem still occur?

[boliver]

well, now that I have removed the anti-virus software, the problem is so intermittent that I'm not sure I'm willing to listen that long on headphones...

My biggest issue now is seeing that the overall latency on my system is really bad:  meaning that dropouts are probably always ready to happen.

[newsposter]

Creative released new drivers overnight that are supposed to 'solve' the dropout problem in both XP and Vista.

Go get 'em!

[boliver]

Thanks.  I only saw the old Extigy drivers (Extigy is a discontinued now so I suspect they won't upgrade those drivers:  unless you think there is another product's drivers that could be used?)

[boliver]

At some point in fooling around with disabling drivers to see which one was causing the once every other second latency issue, I borked my machine.

So I installed Windows Xp1 with absolutely no hardware specific drivers and tested latency again.

It was EXACTLY THE SAME!  Those same spikes every other second. (!)  I hadn't installed any video drivers/sound drivers/network drivers, nothing.  Just Windows.

What could be going on here???

[DarkPenguin]

A bad piece of hardware?

Also, the issue could be that you don't have a driver for something you should.  Does device manager have any unknown devices?

[vbrook]

http://www.usb-audio.com/download.html

You might try this, as an experiment.

[ThoBar]

Have you tried disabling all the hardware you can from bios?

 Have you checked your RAM timings? Have you tried removing a single RAM stick? Have you checked your  IRQ's? IRQ's can often be the cause of these sorts of problems...

[boliver]

I've definetly have disabled what hardware I could from bios (like the useless parallel and serial ports etc.)

But how do I know about the IRQ's?  What do I look for?

I didn't have anything plugged into the USB ports and I was still getting the latency issues.

Also, what would RAM timings have to do with latency of the entire system?  I have in fact set the RAM timings in an overclocked mode (but one that the manufacturer of the RAM countenanced).

I turned off the "auto-overclocking" features of the Gigabyte board but this didn't seem to have any effect.

[DarkPenguin]

Chipset drivers would be the ones I would check first.  I'd get current versions of those.

Set all your timings to normal non overclocked default settings.

There isn't much you can do with IRQs unless you want to hose windows.  And changing IRQs only helps fix bad drivers.

[boliver]

Maddening.

Did all you suggested: installed latest chipset drivers, dropped RAM back to slow settings and still no change.  My friggen laptop shows really low latency.  This machine has super fast bus, RAM and 4 cores!  How could it not be a low latency machine? (!)

[JimH]

Have you tried removing a single RAM stick?

[boliver]

No - kind of messy in my little case...

I have 4 Gigs of RAM BTW.  (two sticks of 2GB each)

Why should that make a difference?

[JimH]

One stick could be bad.  One way to test is to remove one, use the PC for a while, then remove the other.

Did you explore the Weird Problems thread?  Or look at the Nvidia driver problem?

[ThoBar]

I've definetly have disabled what hardware I could from bios (like the useless parallel and serial ports etc.)

But how do I know about the IRQ's?  What do I look for?

Look for too many devices sharing the same IRQ, from memory (which is not that great nowadays) NICs and Soundcards can play silly buggers with each other, and should be on separate IRQs in such a case.

And changing IRQs only helps fix bad drivers.

Thats why I suggested it

[boliver]

When you say, "change IRQ's", you mean just move a USB device to another socket, right?

How can I control what other non-USB devices use IRQ-wise???

[ThoBar]

In your BIOS there should be the ability to assign what device uses what IRQ. You may find there are some constrictions to what can be assigned to what IRQ, and what else changes along with t, but it should be do-able. You may also wnat to try putting your sound card, or any other add-in devices into other slots

[newsposter]

in addition to chipset drivers, check mobo bios levels as well as firmware levels on the sound *and* video cards.

It might be time for a complete survey of all of your driver and firmware levels iregardless of what kind of device it is.  Just taking care of these really basic items will make sure that your system is as up to date as possible BEFORE doing things like manually jamming IRQ settings in.

Once/After that is done (and NOT before), have a look at the power settings for the entire system (control panel|power) as well as individual devices.  Set the system to an office/desktop scheme with minimal power standby settings.  To check individual devices, open up Device Manager, right click each hardware device, and see if you have a 'power settings' tab in the properties sheet.

This advice also applies to the other audio stuttering thread where things seem to be sensitive to monitor power standby.