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216.99.100.2
It used be worse: I now get a quick, mild glitch only every 20-30 seconds or so -- but I think I should get NONE. What's to be done?Check out my setup. I use an older, P4 machine with WinXP SP3 and an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card. My player is Foobar2000 9.5.6 and I use the Revo ASIO driver.
My Foobar components are these ...
I use no DSP. Output setup looks like this ...
I set up an input buffer ...
The O/S runs quite lean; I don't use anit-virus and I've disable all unnecessary services that I could discover. I usually set the Foobar process priority to 'Above normal' ...
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Edits: 02/15/09 02/15/09 02/15/09Follow Ups:
... to use Kernel Streaming rather than the M-Audio Revo 7.1 ASIO driver. With KS I have noticed no glitches. Despite your suggestions and the various things I've tried, I've had no clue why KS works but ASIO causes glitches.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Edits: 02/16/09 02/16/09
It may be your ASIO driver. But I do agree that KS can work well.
I'd double or quadruple my ram though; it's cheap enough.
There's a big difference in XP between .5 gig and 1 gig memory. Your asking the machine to stream flawlessly but not giving it enough resources. I suggest adding ram and OS tweaks to get zero droupouts, then concentrate on improving sound.
A p4 is worth almost nothing, so I assume you're doing this for fun. If not, buying a very inexpensive cpu/motherboard combo from newegg will be a better investment of time and money.
Asio drivers and plugins come in different sonic flavors, KS and WASAPI are native to Windows and for the most part sound the same....
Enjoy....and be glad that at least you got to remove one more variable from the list.
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
If there is a bug in the M-audio ASIO driver, that would explain it.
I don't use M-audio products, because when I used one some years ago there were lots of problems with the driver which resulted in dropouts on both record and play. At the time, I thought perhaps this was a one-time fluke, but others have reported similar problems.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Yeah, I've heard this also. I couldn't get their latest drivers & interface panel to work, so I use the older version. No problems with ASIO on either the 24/96 or the 192. I prefer their interface to the EMU 0404 though. Although I thought the EMU sounded a bit better.
G
"If there is a bug in the M-audio ASIO driver, that would explain it."
But it would not explain the success the vast majority of other users have had with this card.
Both drivers I have used for this card work in both machines I have used them in. Mind you, I keep my machines a tad bit leaner than most people and run very minimal service configurations and few running processes.
Cheers,
Presto
"But it would not explain the success the vast majority of other users have had with this card.
It wouldn't surprise me if a driver bug weren't system dependent in a subtle way. If a driver bug affects most systems, then even a bad software development operation would catch it. But there are problems that can depend on the interaction of a lot of factors. The system I was using at the time was a laptop, and it might have had its own issues. The product was an external USB device, not a PCI card, so maybe the product you had was fine.
I do have a talent for smoking out obscure bugs in software. As a user, this can be a pain in the butt, but when I worked in the industry it was a useful talent. I used to read manuals, see something questionable and try it and then,... :-)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Okay, but if a driver works for 95% of machines, is it still a driver bug? Or just that 5% of machines have an oddity that makes them not work so well? Even something as ubiquitous as a USB or Firewire connection can be hit-and-miss, depending on chipset manufacturer (i.e. Motu recommends specific firewire chipsets for use with their products and specifically points towards a couple NOT to use!)
So how can a maker of a PCI know what other devices it may be sharing an interrupt with?
Just semantics at this point I guess - machine problem or driver problem, it's still a problem. ASIO should work as well as KS, one would think.
Cheers,
Presto
"Okay, but if a driver works for 95% of machines, is it still a driver bug? Or just that 5% of machines have an oddity that makes them not work so well?"
If X doesn't work with Y then there is a bug. To resolve the question of whether the bug is in X or in Y it may be necessary to examine the internal workings of X and Y as well as examine the appropriate specifications for relevant interfaces. (Another possibility is that the specifications are inconsistent or incomplete, i.e. the specifications have a bug.) When dealing with proprietary commercial off the shelf software (COTS) such as one gets from M$ the necessary information may not be available.
If one vendor of drivers has reputation for poor quality and another does not, then there must be something that causes the vendors to enjoy different reputations. It may be nothing more than one having good customer support, and the other poor. Or it may be that the companies sell to different markets and one set of customers is ignorant and doesn't know they are having a problem, even if they are. (This is not uncommon in the computer world.)
I haven't studied the USB specification, so I can't comment on whether it is excessively complex and/or loosely written. In the early days, I was familiar with some individuals who were working on USB, and I was not terribly impressed with their technical skills.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Some of their driver releases have been hit and miss in the past 8 years but I have been mostly happy with my DIO24/96 which is an older model using the same driver.
I am using ASIO exclusively.
Cheers
Thomas
Put the card into a different PCI slot. Sometimes this changes which IRQ the card is on.
To check this before/after, go to the "Device Manager" in the Control Panel. Then go to the V iew pulldown menu and select "View Resources by Connection" and expand Interrupt Request (IRQ).
If you are sharing an IRQ with the card, post what device it is.
Cheers,
Presto
My machine, a small-footprint, desktop, has only one available PCI slot.
People are recommending more RAM which is always a good idea. But I'm loath to put to much money into this old machine: I'll watch for "deals" on RAM, though.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
.
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
I'll probably need to crack the case to determine the type since I have no documentation.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
I have a couple of 1/2 Gig sticks that I can't use so no biggie.
Kingston and Centon
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
While he is in there he could also Disable devices that are not needed like any unused USB ports, network cards etc.
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
check the IRQ list anyways.
THe device he is sharing an IRQ with may not be needed at all, and as you say, can be disabled or uninstalled.
Cheers,
Presto
When you first encounter a problem, it is reasonable to guess the cause and made a change based on your guess. However, after you try one or two obvious things, you need a different approach. First try to learn what's going on when you get a glitch. Then isolate the cause and fix the real problem.
Thomaspf suggested using the DPC Latency checker. Good idea. That was one of the things I would have suggested. It doesn't not appear that the cause is at the level of interrupt handlers or DPC code.
I'd suggest that you leave Task Monitor or Process Monitor running while you play audio. I use Task Monitor as see what's happening in my PC; it usually tells me what I want to know without a need for other tools. You can configure the columns to be shown in the processes tab. (I'd suggest adding Page faults.) Start some music and just watch the Task Monitor window.
--- your system
You described your PC as having 0.5 GB of Ram. If it has an integrated graphics adapter, you have a marginal amount of memory for Win XP. Watch the memory size and paging activity in task Monitor.
Your excellent screenshots show a Foobar setting to buffer a large amount
og the music file in RAM. That is probably counterproductive given the limited amount of memory you have. Forget about RAM buffering the music file for now.
I see that your system is rather old. If the video adapter uses AGP rather than a newer interface, it is more likely to cause PCI bus level problems by tying up the bus for long periods.
----
An AMD or Intel dual core processor with a generous amount of RAM (2 GB for XP, more for Vista) is much more resistant to buffer underruns. (That's what you are hearing.) A quiet, low power PC with an efficient low noise, low ripple power supply is a good idea too. When you think about spending money on your system, consider a PC upgrade as a alternative to the usual audiophile purchases.
Bill
Your point about a large input buffer with not much RAM is good. At best, the program would read the file input virtual memory which is on the hard disk.
I couldn't spot any real pattern with Task Manager running. Common activity, such as lsass.exe reads didn't have an obvious affect.
As I mentioned in my UPDATE post, glitches seem to be virtually eliminated now that I have gone from ASIO to Kernel Streaming.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Do you have the latest 7.1 driver? Also, did you re-install f2k after upgrading to xp sp3? Also jusched.exe is an unnecessary process. Do you have an integrated sound device in use for other purposes? Looks like drvlsnr.exe is a process installed with the Compaq SoundMAX integrated digital audio?
Yes, that's the Revo 7.1 drivers I have, and they were installed after the SP3 upgrade.
Thanks; as you suggest, I was able to end both jusched.exe and drvlsnr.exe without any adverse consequences.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Have you ruled out the player as the cause? Also, was the OS upgraded after foobar was installed? If so, you might try reinstalling foobar.
I switched to Kernel Stream and am getting a lot fewer glitches so far. And I'm still getting bit-perfect streams as evidenced by the HDCD indicator lighting on my DAC.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
I use Foobar 9.5.4, Vista 32, WASAPI, buffer set at 2000, SRC, MAudio Rev 7.1 w/ 5.10.00.0063, AMD Brisbane 3600X2. The latency runs at about 150, but it jumps all over. I listen to LastFM all the time. I don't notice any stutter or drop outs.
Knowing these computers it could be most anything, from your Internet connection to your memory. I mean the computer's, not yours. I'm sure yours is fine.
Also, motherboards don't last forever. I just noticed you only have a half gig of ram. I just don't think that is enough, IMHO.
Edits: 02/15/09
probably a factor: not enough RAM.
adding another half gig might help but sometimes 2 x 500 MB modules are not as good as 1 x 1GB.
you've got a lot running on the machine, try again at paring down the number of background programs.
In cases like this the problem mostly comes down to buggy or poorly written drivers.
Have a look with the DPC latency checker (link below).
Unfortunately the problem is sometimes the chipset drivers or the video card. What chipset and video card (driver version) are you having in your computer ? What other devices have you connected to your PC?
Cheers
Thomas
My result looks pretty good: a typical latency of about 12µs which is actually a lot better than the roughly 40µs on my much faster AMD Phenom X3 running Vista.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Wow, 12µs is exceptionally low. Did you run this while you where playing audio and expriencing the dropouts?On the laptop I am typing this message right now I see between 500µs and 1000µs and I never have audio dropouts.
When you check the CPU,disk, and network activity with perfmon. Do you see anything special when these dropouts occur?
Cheers
Thomas
Edits: 02/15/09
My latency result with Foobar playing looks like the following; quite a bit higher, but I gather not the cause of the problem ...
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Edits: 02/15/09
First off, 12us is really low... even the 125 max with the player playing seems more than acceptable. Have you let DPC run for a long while and seen if it spikes... I'm guessing you have.ok here's my weird thing I just found on my system.
Was checking again what my DPC ran at with the player on; before have only checked it with the player off.
With the player off,,, I get a steady 62us
With the music running,,, it bounces from 12us to 20us... That's right, it's lower with me playing music ... now that's weird.Vista64prem http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=352.msg4021#msg4021 > WAV/CUE files on HDDs via fW400;[XXHE player Q1 2 processor appt.#3;player priority normal;thread priority realtime];> pci FW800> FireFace800> StelloDAC
Edits: 02/15/09
You may be seeing measurement artifacts, e.g. the system clock is synchronizing the measuring processes with the measured processes.
If you use the Windows task manager you can set it to look at the delta value of I/Os and paging operations. This may help you isolate problem entities.
I run my audio computer without a paging file. This completely eliminates the possibility of paging overhead. If you don't have enough RAM you won't be able to do much multi-tasking with 500 MB of RAM, but at least if you run out of memory you get a hard error and not a mysterious glitch.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Right now my page file is drive C where the page file is located, while my music file source is drive F, and external USB drive. The system "recommends" 754 MB and it's set to 756 MB.
I don't understand such things very well, but according to Task Manager, the single most active process in terms of I/O reads is lsass.exe -- explanations of what this is for are technobabble to me. The largest single user of page file is one of several instances of syshost.exe
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
That lsass report seems quite strange. There is a virus that masquerades as it. It sneaks by because it uses upper case "eye" instead of lower case "el" which look the same with the usual system font. You can tell the difference if you change the system font to something like times roman.
John S.
However there is no "Isass.exe" on my machined unless it's somehow hidden. Also I have run a complete virus scan without finding anything.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
Have you had a chance to look at perfmon results during these glitches?
CPU usage loafs along between 1% and 3%. There is no spike when a glitch occurs. There is basically no network usage.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
What do you see as paging activity?
Are you playing you music from the local drive or from the Windows Home server you mentioned in a different post? If it is remote you should see a rather steady stream of data over the netowrk.
Cheers
Thomas
But then you are using a weird player. Hahaha
Question for you, what type of computer are you using, how old is it and what is the Front Side Bus speed?
It's aN HP small-footprint with Pentium 4, 2.66GHz processor, with 0.5GB RAM. It appears to be an Intel chipset, maybe 82801(?), and an Intel graphics controller, 82865G.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
I feel part of your problem is that you definitely do not have enough Ram, so I would address that issue and see what happens.
Vincent
I agree that 512MB is a bit tight on the RAM. However, if that is the problem you should be able to see the glitches correlated to disk i/o and paging when you look at your perfmon history.
This assumes that a task kicks in every 30s or so and causes heavy paging traffic which might interfere with your playback.
Do you see anything special in perfmon when these glitches happen?
Cheers
Thomas
remove all the dlls that you don't use....lower your buffer length also check the buffer rate of the M-audio device in the control center
I assume you actually already tried that though...I have a P4 machine as well, but I dont get any playback glitches. my buffer is also 99999999 but my buffer length is practically 0. I am running vista with wasapi plugin and only have the dll's that i really need...about 5 total.
Wish I could be of more help...
Also you have about 10 processes too many....I have Vista and I only have 29 processes running. When I had XP I was down to 20.
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
Edits: 02/15/09
I'll try to figure out which components I don't actually need and get rid of them.
I'll check in to the services and processes further. There are a couple of things that add to the number that would otherwise be necessary: (1) I use Windows Home Server to back up the music machine (and others on my home network), and (2) I user Remote Desktop Connection to operate the music machine from another computer closer to my listening position.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
If you aren't using your network to actually play music, then I would disable the network interface card and then reboot your machine. While this isn't as thorough as killing off lots of network processes, it will slow them down, probably to the point where they can't cause problems. If doing this gets rid of your problem, you will have narrowed down your search. You can then work on finding out which network processes are creating the problem and when you have done that you will be able to use the network without difficulties.
You didn't mention anything about anti-virus software. My experience is that this can be the worst of the worst. Some of this screws up the machine even when all the features have been "disabled". The last thing I had to do to get my audio computer to work properly was to uninstall the anti-virus software.
If you are getting glitches every few seconds, consider yourself lucky. You have a chance of isolating and fixing the problem. The worst glitches are those that happen every few hours or days.
Good luck!
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I'm not using an anti-virus and have uninstalled the progam -- these programs are definitely hogs.
I won't disable network because I user Remote Access to control the music computer from my general purpose machine located beside my listening chair.
I'm not so obsessive that a glitch every few hours would bother me. I did begin my audio hobby in the day when vinyl was the main option, so I got used to the rice crispies: in fact, the glitches aren't really any more distracting than those.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
I'm not suggesting that you keep the network disabled. Just disable it for a couple of hours or days, etc. and see if it makes a difference or not.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
An easy way is just to make another folder then drag one dll at a time into the folder and start Foobar. You will get a message saying something changed and do you want to save the settings, just say yes. When Foobar comes up see if the features you normally use work, if they do, proceed to the next dll if not put it back.
When you are done you will have only the dll's that you actually use running and thats it.
Below is a link for tweaking your services in XP. Its a very good site and explains what each service does along with separate columns for safe, tweaked, and bare bone.
Doing these things will have no adverse affect of music playback what so ever, esp the dll's [as you will put it back if it does]. For the services, if in doubt leave it alone. You will have a faster leaner machine with less variables to worry about.
Karma Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
And I will work to get rid of all Foobar components that I don't need.
Black Viper has been my main guide to disabling unnecessary services -- great resource.
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Feanor's Classical Music Survey: 250 Compositions
Feanor's stereo configuration
> I'll try to figure out which components I don't actually need and get rid
> of them.
Don't go changing lots of stuff now. You'll just confuse the issue.
Bill
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