Topic by cpcohen

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  • cpcohen
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  • Registered: 15-04-2013
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Topic: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

Pianoteq sounds fine.  I'm using ASIO4ALL driver, and a Vantec USB "7.1" soundcard. I just downloaded a new driver for the soundcard, but I'm not using it.

When I play, CPU utilization is minimal, according to the "Performance" display, except:

. . . Occasionally -- several times per hour --  there's a short audio dropout. 

It doesn't correlate with "lots of notes playing".

When it happens, I see the "Audio load" suddenly jump in the "Performance" display.

I can't see that Pianoteq, or the ASIO4ALL driver, is doing this.  So I suspect that _something_ in Windows 8.1 is using all of the CPU capacity.

. . . What should I turn off?

I have tried this with Internet access disabled (using ZoneAlarm), and my AVG antivirus software turned off.  So it's not one of those two.

. . . Any ideas?

Thanks --

.      Charles

PS -- I found 

http://www.blackviper.com/service-confi...gurations/

suggested in a previous thread, and I'll go through what it suggests unless somebody has a good idea, here.

Reply by stamkorg

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  • Registered: 05-04-2014
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Re: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

Hello, I had this kind of disagrements with my laptop.

I disabled some things: dvd player, wifi, battery checker, in fact you can disable all the functions you don't need. I was able to determine that the battery checker was the first cause of dropouts.

Now, there are very few dropouts. I wil try to see with a small and free software called DPC Latency checker if I can identify if a background windows process causes these dropouts, but it is a hard works, because I need to disconnect them one by one and see if dropouts continue to occur.

Good luck

Reply by Mossy

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Re: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

I had a new laptop this weekend to test PTQ on.  With the performance tab up, I'd see the CPU counter at 25% the entire time ... and then a periodic 100% spike with audio cutting out.  I then used other CPU performance tools to monitor the system and no such spike showed on these other tools.

So PTQ might be misinterpreting the CPU load and shutting off sound to deal with what it thinks is too much activity.  I turned off the "detect CPU overload" option -- and that seem to have solved the problem for me.  Basically if you think you have more than enough power, set the process priority higher and just let PTQ shove everything else into the background.

Last edited by Mossy (27-04-2014 14:58)
https://soundcloud.com/mossy456/

Reply by Luc Henrion

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Re: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

Go here:
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
This will tell you everything, it's a pure gem !

Luc Henrion's Website

Reply by cpcohen

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Re: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

Luc Henrion wrote:

Go here:
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
This will tell you everything, it's a pure gem !

THANK YOU!

It took about two minutes to download, install, run --

. . . and find that my Wi-Fi adapter should be turned _off_
. . . to pass its "suitability for realtime audio" test.


I will investigate further -- especially that "detect CPU overload" switch in Pianoteq.

Thanks again -- it's a gem, indeed!

.     Charles

Reply by Luc Henrion

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Re: Windows 8.1 -- audio dropouts ?

you're welcome :-)

Luc Henrion's Website