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In Reply to: RE: USB audio drop outs on XP - every other track. Anyone? posted by Presto on July 01, 2008 at 13:53:16
You've tried a lot of stuff. I was not sure reading that list whether you had tried waveout and/or DirectSound as an alternative to ASIO. (If you are using ASIO4All, keep in mind that neither Microsoft or the DAC maker ever tested that path from player s/w to the hardware.)
Some questions:
- What are the specs for your computer system? (CPU, graphics h/w, ram, motherboard) AGP sounds like an old system.
- Are you sending 44.1 KHz / 16 bits to the UCB DAC (in your receiver) or a upsampled rate like 192/24? If you are upsampling, do you hear dropouts when you send 44.1 / 16 out on the USB cable?
- What CPU utilization do you see? Is it low ( < 1o%) or high (> 80%)?
A suggestion: You might start the music player and then bring up task manager. Click on the performance tab and watch the CPU utilization graph. Check to see if a spike occurs at the time when you hear a dropout. If so, then click on the processes tab and then click on "cpu" to sort processes by that measurement. Scroll down so that you are seeing the largest users. Keeping watching through one or two dropouts.
Bill
Follow Ups:
Hey Old Listener:
My PC is a "Cicero" once sold by the electronics megagiant Future Shop.
It has a MicroStar Mobo for a PIV Socket 478 CPU and supports Hyperthreading. I have the 2.93GHZ hyperthreading CPU. It came with 1GB ram and I've never needed more. It has a speed controlled oversized fan that barely spins. CPU load when playing back 44.1 material is under 5% but is now 10% because I am down to one processor when I disabled hyperthreading to get rid of ACPI. Still, that's peak - average is 5%.
I do have a wireless card in there, but no other PCI cards. The graphics is AGP, which is only a few years old. AGP 8X was quite common a few years ago, and PCIe was just coming out. This PC is only about three years old.
- I am not upsampling. The Burr Brown PCM2704 is only good fo 16 bit and from 32 to 48 khz. Even when hardware warrants it, I am usually not a software upsampling fan.
- CPU is about 5% average, peaks of 10.
I have already been watching the task manager like a hawk, with ALL columns enabled. Nothing. Nada. No correlation. No CPU or memory spikes. No I/O read or writes... nothing seems to coincide. Except one thing. When I use the scroll wheel in iexplorer, I can get CPU utilization of almost 80% on internet explorer! (This was before - now I am not sharing an IRQ between my network card + video card and USB controllers.)
The answer was in IRQ conflicts, and the ACPI in general.
Thanks for chiming in Old Listener.
Cheers,
Presto
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions after you had found your problem.
I took a quick look at two of my PCs on which I play audio. I noted that I have shared interrupts involving USB on each computer. On one PC, I'm using a PCI soundcard that has an unshared IRQ. On the other PC, I'm currently using on-board sound which shares an IRQ with USB. I have not heard any dropouts. Of course, I don't use USB audio either.
I'd guess that your problem is more specific that just a shared IRQ. Either the IRQ routines are not well written or the AGP video is generated far more interrupts than it should.
Glad to hear that you found a solution.
Bill
"I'd guess that your problem is more specific that just a shared IRQ."
It seems this was the case too - when I got the IRQs to be unique to each USB controller / USB HUB that I was using, the problem actually got WORSE.
Something else is at work that is beyond my PC know-how.
I am re-installing windows to see how the drivers bahve with a fresh install with the default windows service configuration.
If I get glitch-free playback, I might be inclined to believe that by making my machine faster by eliminating services I *thought* I didn't need, I could have shut of services that I really DID need!!
Just FYI - I have every audio interface I own (about four of em) running perfectly any time I want with no problems or dropouts. It's only this recent desire to try a USB audio device under XP that has lead me down the garden path.
Sadly, the sound BETWEEN dropouts was exceptional - and is what made me so determined to make it work. When I try SPDIF tonite, I will report back with my sonic impressions. Hopefully, SPDIF will not be a lesser method. I recall it was not that bad, but I think I was favoring USB there for a while.
Could be pscyhoacoustics... I mean psycho-delusion at work...
Cheers,
Presto
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