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I'm using a PC with Windows 7, but the same was happening on my Windows XP machine. I discovered, however, that if I close and reopened foobar, all is fine again. The problem especially happens if I awake my computer from sleep. Any ideas what's happening? Thank God that closing and reopening foobar fixes things, otherwise I would have to admit myself to a real asylum!
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"Humility is the true mark of genius. Just get used to it."
-Anonymous
Follow Ups:
Gang,
If you have this problem and it's an async dac then it is primarily that the feedback pipe is not getting through. Check your USB port, never use the one on the front of the computer. None of the ports are created equal.
If the feedback does not get received, all USB async dacs will under or overrun data to the dac chip causing pops and clicks.
Thanks,
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin
Agreed. With many pc's, especially lower spec laptops, it's also best to be sure that the USB DAC is the ONLY thing plugged into any of the PC's USB ports during music playback.
Could it be electrical/RFI noise from lighting, appliances turning on/off, etc.?
If you have not rebooted the computer for a while, try this. You may be getting memory leaks too.
I've read that Foobar suffers from memory leaks, but I wouldn't be surprised if Win 7 itself does as well. When all else fails and things become 'flakey' it's not uncommon to 'fix' it with a Windows reboot.
Try the DPC Latency checker. My audio PC has peaks of 180 microseconds which is quite low. The "family internet PC" I am on, a lower end HP Pavillion, not modded or tweaked, gets 325 microseconds.
If you're getting spikes in the "red" region you should see which driver or background service / program is the culprit.
Increasing buffer size can make the clicks go away, but you didn't address the original problem - you just masked it.
Cheers,
Presto
I ran the DPC, but when I was not having problems, and it told me that all is well and that my system is capable of direct streaming. Now I have to wait until I get the problem again and recheck. The problem is intermittent, so it may be a while.
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"Humility is the true mark of genius. Just get used to it."
-Anonymous
Wireless can cause latency spikes of 30000 uS!
I have aound 150uS on mine with Latenecy Mon and 50 uS using DLP on compatible OSs
"Wireless can cause latency spikes of 30000 uS!"
I've observed similar (or worse) delays establishing a Windows remote desktop connection from the measured computer to another computer. From the way this happens, it looks like this is due to execution of cryptographic calculations. (These are probably done at high priority so that the memory residence of key material can be minimized, a policy that may be good from a security perspective, but is terrible from a real time perspective.) I assume that similar considerations occur with wireless. In addition, many inexpensive wireless adapters rely heavily on the CPU to perform various processing associated with managing the radio.
It is best to have no wireless equipment on an audio computer, but if wireless is needed for reasons of physical cable wiring, then one can get an outboard wireless bridge that has the radio function and connect that via a short wired run to the audio computer. This will remove all the radio processing from the audio computer. However, it will not give the low latency that the wired connection provides, so if you are streaming audio over the network this may be problematic. Normally the latency is very low with a Wireless N connection, but sometimes it will go up to a second, as can be seen by ping tests. There are, of course, other potential negative impacts on sound quality from wireless equipment near audio equipment and possible negative impact on health from wireless equipment near people.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
adjust your buffer size
Fred:
That's been my experience as well. I was getting *massive* latency spikes due to a buggy wireless adapter driver conflicting with windows.
Hmmm... so why are we all mucking about with wireless cards in machines that are supposed to be purpose built for audio!! ;)
Cheers,
Presto
What confuses me is that it usually plays excellently. I personally think that something happens on my USB port. I using a MusicStreamer II+, which I like a lot.
Best regards,
Bob
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"Humility is the true mark of genius. Just get used to it."
-Anonymous
Try something like http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
Maybe you can isolate the problem
The Well Tempered Computer
I use DPC Latency checker. This will catch various low level operating system and drive problems related to interrupt processing and operating system kernel processing in response to interrupts. Other problems relate to I/O, file system locks and competition by various processes, those that you may be running and those that the system may be running "beneath the sheets". I suggest running the Windows 7 task monitor and look at the various processes. Be sure and click the box that allows you to see the system processes. Take a good look at what is going on and try to get a feel as to what looks normal when your system is working well. When you are having problems, then take a look and see if you can see something different going on. It is not necessary to understand what all the various rows and columns of this display mean. Just watch them and over time you will get a feel for what is good and what is bad from an audio perspective.I am assuming that the OP is running Windows 7 as a general purpose operating system, not stripping it down. If one can dedicate a computer purely to audio than one can take a different approach and remove everything that is unnecessary to music playback. This may or may not make the ultimate result sound any better, but it will definitely reduce the number of places where problems can hide. In addition, if one runs a dedicated system that is not connected to the Internet you can dispense with Windows Update. That way, M$ won't "improve" the performance of the system and recreate stutter, glitches or poor sound in the interest of "security" or revenue enhancement.
The one thing that is most likely to create problems is any kind of anti-virus software. The worst of this is third party programs that aren't tightly integrated with the operating system. However, the free "Windows Defender" can also create problems. Usually, it doesn't have a bad effect, but periodically it goes about its "housekeeping" all the while screwing the real-time audio performance of the system. So if there is one thing one can do to get rid of your problems, disable the anti-virus software. This is probably not a good idea to do on a system used for email and web surfing, but if you can abstain from these activities for a while, then you can safely test to see if this is the source of your problem. Unfortunately, Windows Defender does not just slow down system activity during its periodic updates (which can be scheduled for the middle of the night). This is why you will have to look closely at each of your system processes and understand what it is doing and whether or not it is necessary. Sorry, this is the reality of using commercial off the shelf software for a hard realtime critical application such as high quality audio playback.Or, you can just crank up the buffer sizes and hope the problem goes away. If this approach works in your system, then you won't have the stutter and glitches. However, be aware that doing this will probably result in a lower sound quality, because smaller buffer sizes (when they work) almost always sound better. (Bits "should" just be bits, but practice seldom accords with theory, as will be apparent if one listens carefully.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 11/24/14
Yes, this is a general use computer I just built.
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"Humility is the true mark of genius. Just get used to it."
-Anonymous
Doesn't work on W8 onwards. Latency Mon does.
I have noticed pops and clicks with foobar as well, but they are infrequent enough that I assumed they were errors in my music files. I also keep my computer in standby.
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