Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

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RE: Thanks, I'll try it, DR ~nt

Posted by Tony Lauck on October 20, 2008 at 06:46:57:
In general, you are likely to get better sound quality (between glitches) when you use fewer buffers and fewer glitches when you use additional buffers. You should use as few buffers as possible. It is best to experiment with your system and find out what software is causing glitches. You can kill off all unnecessary processes and system services. (It may not be so easy to find out which are "necessary". If you kill a necessary one you will have to reboot your system.) I say "in general" because the effects on sound quality are system dependent. For example, if your DAC has very good jitter rejection then software timing changes in the PC may have little or no effect on sound quality. Similarly, if your DAC has a huge amount of its internal jitter, then any extra from the PC won't matter. So if you don't hear differences, it may be a good thing or a bad thing, technically. (Musically, it's good if you don't have to obsess over subtle differences in sound quality!)

I used the task manager to look at running processes and observed their cpu usage, disk accesses, and page faults as a way of finding ones that I should kill off. This isn't a perfect way, since the task manager uses sufficient resources so that it disrupts the system, e.g. causes audio glitches itself.

I would start by disabling your network adapter or physically disconnecting the network cable. Then uninstall your anti-virus software. (With Norton, simply disabling the various features did not prevent the computer from going on holiday for extended periods.) There may be anti-virus programs that can be temporarily disabled without leaving a significant effect on audio performance, but I am not familiar with them. I don't use any anti-virus software on my audio workstation, but then it is behind a hardware firewall from the Internet and only connected to my LAN intermittently. I don't web surf or do email on this machine.

Running an ultra lightweight audio application such as cPlay helps as well. This does most of the work before the music playback starts, including FLAC decoding. If you have the RAM, then this is the way to go. Even upsampling is very efficient with this software. Of course, without the overhead comes the lack of fancy features.

Tony Lauck

"Perception, inference and authority are the valid sources of knowledge" - P.R. Sarkar