Topic: Windows 11 users beware of latency issues and awful buzzing.
Earlier this year, replaced my older computer with a new prebuild from Dell. I would have built a new machine myself and spec'd out the hardware and operating system and it definitely wouldn't have been Windows 11. Unfortunately, as luck would have it my computer actually died at the height of the overpriced hardware, so I opted for a new machine which unfortunately came with Windows 11. This machine wasn't cheap either but far less expensive than what I would have paid to build one myself at the time.
After setting up everything and getting my cables, piano, and Pianoteq setup, I've had numerous random buzzes and audio glitches. These buzzes and audio glitches occur randomly, making them difficult to find. Thinking this was the built-in audio, I replaced this with an expensive Sound Blaster AE-9. This works well after I turned off the "effects" they have and use the direct sound which is only what Pianoteq produces and not the stupid effects that Creative Labs thinks sounds good such as their Concert mode. The built-in Maxx audio is crap to put it bluntly and there's no way to turn off their interface software without going through great hoops, so this was a better solution.
After replacing the card, the glitches occurred anyway. I had already replaced the cables with new ones, and now I was at a loss. At that point, I went through adjusting the buffer size larger and larger until the piano felt like I was typing in a terminal connected to a network at a 110 baud rate, and the glitches still occurred!
I disconnected the digital piano from the computer, and everything was fine with piano without Pianoteq. As soon as I reconnected to the computer, the glitches occurred. Thinking this was the I/O interface on the piano, I was ready to put in a service request to Roland to have a technician come out and look at the piano.
But just before I went through that expense, although this may be under warranty, I decided to check online more. Sure enough, others have experienced this with their audio as well. In among the me-too posts, and useless posts from the Microsoft "bots" saying to reinstall Windows, I found a useful link to a program called Latency Monitor.
https://resplendence.com/latencymon
Running this while playing showed the culprit in its logs. When a glitch occurs, the software puts up a red banner saying a glitch occurred and then it's easy to find the culprit. For Windows 11, there were many things but the ones that stood out were some things that kept hitting the network all the time. I checked for malware and found none as I thought would be the case and disabled or exited applications that phone home, or I suspected did so.
My solution of disabling or closing background processes and programs helped a lot but didn't solve the problem 100%. I get some glitches now but nothing like they occurred before. It's a start in the right direction and I hope to eventually solve this completely.
My conclusion is Windows 11 is notoriously busy all the time checking the network, poking at this, scanning that, and doing way more in the background than any other OS I've ever used. Avoid it at all costs if you can!
If I could have used Windows 10, I would have but I had no choice for Windows operating system for this hardware. Running Linux is fine, but I have other programs which are Windows based and that means setting up a Windows virtual machine and lose performance, or a dual boot setup with Pianoteq on the Linux partition and then copying over the audio files to a shared network store to transfer between the two operating systems. For me this is an additional inconvenience for something that used to work so easily and seamlessly in the past.
