USB audio issue

[elnero]

Wondering if anyone might be able to give me some insight into a minor issue I'm having with the USB audio on my Gateway FX laptop running Windows 7.

I've never had much of an issue with the Pico and USB audio, generally it's been plug and play without glitches. I get occasional noise from one thing or another, mostly at work where I haven't done much in the line of special setup and there's a ton of interference. When I got the laptop though part of my intention was to use it in conjunction with my Pico for music playback allowing me a system I can more easily move around the house so I'd like to get the best out of it I can. Generally the sound is fine but I get the occasional seemingly random click or snap which is a bit annoying. With foobar I've tried using WASAPI, ASIO4ALL and even direct sound and iTunes out of curiosity but nothing seems to overcome it. With WASAPI and ASIO4ALL I've played with various buffer lengths to no effect. I even went as far as to update my audio drivers even though I didn't figure it would help I updated my audio drivers to the proper coxenant drivers from Gateway's site.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to try next, anyone have any suggestions?

[Beefy]

In my experience, buffer size is critical. On my WinXP laptop I get the best results with a long buffer in ASIO (768-1024 samples) and a short buffer in Foobar (0.5-1 second). Any longer than a second in Foobar and things get quite bad. But if you have played around, and different buffer lengths don't help you, then I am at a loss as well......

[EDIT] Oh, and FWIW, almost all glitches that I do still get happen in relation to heavy internet activity. Any particular memory resident software that you are running that might cause system stalls?

[jinp6301]

DPC Latency Checker

that usually helps me troubleshoot sound problems

[elnero]

Thanks for the input guys, trying that DPC Latency Checker now, apparently I have a device driver that is behaving badly. Tracking it down is proving to be difficult though, none of the easy to disable/re-enable devices seem to be the culprit.

[jinp6301]

I had the same problems as Beefy. When there was high network activity, there was a lot of bad stuff happening with the audio stream

[Beefy]

DPC Latency Checker

that usually helps me troubleshoot sound problems

Cool little tool. It might help stop lost last few tiny little problems I have

Thanks for the input guys, trying that DPC Latency Checker now, apparently I have a device driver that is behaving badly. Tracking it down is proving to be difficult though, none of the easy to disable/re-enable devices seem to be the culprit.

Virus scanner perhaps? I use Kaspersky which is generally pretty innocuous compared to, say McAfee, but it still seems to cause very brief stalls every now and again when scanning stuff. I have often wondered whether my network delays are because of the scanning of the network activity.

[elnero]

Ok, I've tried disabling and enabling pretty much all the devices I can without wreaking havoc, I've downloaded drivers from Gateways site, disabled Avast, my anti-virus protection. All to no avail. At idle with nothing running the DPC Latency checker is in the green most of the time with the occasional spike into the yellow zone and then every now and then a red one. Now when I click on the control panel, system and go into device manager I'll get a wicked spike and then as I click around in there I'll get the occasional healthy spike. The same seems to be true of just generally poking around in folders and opening files like images, vids, doc's, etc. I'm not sure if that suggests something in particular that might be causing the spikes.

Oh and I ran the checker on my desktop and have tried some of the things with it, my Absolute Maximum is 256 and it seems to run at well under 100 whereas the laptop has a lot more variation, generally from around 150 to over 500 with an Absolute Max of 18416

[jinp6301]

It might also be your power settings. Mine worked a lot better when I let my processor work at 100% all the time instead of running it at power saving levels. Also, make sure you try turning off the wireless

I also feel like I should say (since no one has said it yet), buy a mac and you wont have any of these problems

[elnero]

It might also be your power settings. Mine worked a lot better when I let my processor work at 100% all the time instead of running it at power saving levels. Also, make sure you try turning off the wireless

I also feel like I should say (since no one has said it yet), buy a mac and you wont have any of these problems

I was very tempted to get a Macbook but the other part of what I wanted to use the laptop is light gaming and some graphics/animation work. Unfortunately those aren't strong suits for the Mac, well graphics yes, animation no.

Turning off the wireless and disabling any network devices was one of the first things I've tried. Although I think there's been a few things causing problems I believe I've tracked down the main culprit/s. The one that's causing the big spikes seems to be the nVidia video driver, it's odd because I uninstalled it earlier and still seemed to be having issues but I don't remember how bad they were. Another thing that seems to cause more minor spikes into the yellow zone on DPC Latency Checker is Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery device driver. Right now I'm running with that and the display adapters driver disabled and everything seems to be working great, no spikes whatsoever. Now I'll have to go in search of a video driver that doesn't cause these spikes. Considering I've tried 2 other nVidia drivers today already I'm not looking forward to trying to track down one that works properly.

Anyone know where I can get older nVidia drivers for 9M series notebooks?

[elnero]

you could have dual booted.

Yes and no, the problem there is still feature wise you get a lot less for the money, so considering my budget would have been an entry level MacBook it would have been severely lacking for what I could get otherwise for the same or less so dual boot or not I would have been somewhat crippled for what I wanted it for. As it is I got a dual core 2 ghz processor, 500 gig 7200 rpm HD, 4 gig RAM, GeForce 9800M GTS with 1 gig of RAM and a 17 inch monitor delivered to my door for significantly less than an entry level MacBook. Now if budget wasn't an issue it would be a different story.

[Grahame]

you could have dual booted.

Ahh, a Hackintosh! I like your thinking

[elnero]

Ahh, a Hackintosh! I like your thinking

I hadn't thought of that. Will it work with any PC or does it have to be a fairly specific configuration?

[jinp6301]

Very specific. It is very hard to get a good config for a hackintosh for a normal laptop but you should check it out anyways

[elnero]

I don't know if anyone is interested but this information may help someone else so I'll post it. After much mucking about I seem to have alleviated the issue at least for the most part. First the DPC Latency Checker that jinp6301 linked to earlier proved indispensable in tracking down the culprits. The worst offender was the nVidia drivers which although I've found one that's much, much better, it's still not perfect. Another culprit seems to have been Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery which essentially is the icon that shows the battery level. I leave this disabled unless I need a visual for whatever reason.

I also set the foobar's process priority higher and keep it set higher using a little app called Prio - Priority Saver .

[Beefy]

I also set the foobar's process priority higher and keep it set higher using a little app called Prio - Priority Saver .

Nice. I could use this for a few tasks at work as well.