“Have you ever used your PC to play an MP3 or a DVD? If you answered yes, you’re among the overwhelming majority of PC customers who use their computer for audio and video applications, encompassing everything from watching a movie to playing a game to viewing a YouTube clip. But you may have also had an experience where your audio or video wasn’t quite perfect – perhaps the video was a bit choppy or the audio stuttered. We call this a ‘glitch’ – a perceived discontinuity in your audio or video that interrupts the playback experience. In this blog post, we’ll be focusing on audio glitching: we’ll examine the ecosystem challenges that can cause glitches, and we’ll discuss the work we’ve been doing to improve the Windows 7 experience.”
I’m experiencing one glitch since Beta.
After few minutes of sound inactivity sound card goes into power saving mode (S3). Now if I want to start some media playback – sound card wakes up in 5-10 seconds. During this time: no sound and media app locks up.
Haven’t found workaround for this – setting “High Performance” power profile doesn’t help.
HW: SoundMAX integrated digital HD audio
“In order for you to hear music from your speakers, data needs to be delivered to your audio hardware approximately every 10 milliseconds, or 30 times in the blink of an eye!”
This is ridiculous, especially for cases like MP3s and DVD, where you know in advance what sound will be played (as oppose to games where sound changes dynamically depending on what the used is doing).
Why can’t the audio hardware have it’s own RAM buffer to hold a few seconds worth of sound and use it’s own timer to send it to headphones? This way the rest of the systems can be as busy as a bee, it won’t cause any sound glitches.
Sounds like doing back flips trying to work around a problem in software, while 10 cents worth of hardware would’ve actually SOLVE it.
Actually, decent audio hardware has his own RAM to buffer data and full-blown audio processors, for example, top Creative sound boards comes with 64MB of ram (or more) and a 400Mhz processor.
The problem is that: now almost every pc around uses crappy low cost onboard hardware for sound. These systems can’t have their own dedicated ram because they are nothing more than cheap digital-analog converters, mostly without any “real” hardware capability, even if trivial, like converting sample rates.
Actually, decent audio hardware has his own RAM to buffer data and full-blown audio processors, for example, top Creative sound boards comes with 64MB of ram (or more) and a 400Mhz processor.
The problem is that: now almost every pc around uses crappy low cost onboard hardware for sound. These systems can’t have their own dedicated ram because they are nothing more than cheap digital-analog converters, mostly without any “real” hardware capability, even if trivial, like converting sample rates.
I’ve got a SB Live! myself, one of those very first ones. Works like a dream in Linux and XP. Not so in Win7 unfortunately
Anyways, I read something that Vista and Win7 do converting and mixing and all that anyway in software nowadays and don’t support doing it in hardware and as such it doesn’t make any difference to have a high-end soundcard.
Yeah, which makes it run like crap. I have so many sound issues in Vista And Windows 7. I have a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum, and I occasionally get a weird popping noise. Not to mention the volume is all sorts of screwed. The volume just seems so much louder and clearer under Linux. Under Windows (Vista and 7) it sounds muddled and I almost have to turn up my speakers all the way.
Not to mention they tweaked the mixer so it doesn’t show all the options that should be there.
It seems to me the only cards that Creative really supports anymore (for Vista/7) is the X-Fi cards. but then they don’t support them worth a crap in Linux. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Anyone want to suggest a better sound card? (I really hate onboard crap)
Creative lost any respect years ago when they refused to fix long standing issues in their drivers in favour of just powering forward and releasing new products with just as buggy drivers. Midiman make an audiophile range which is pretty good quality:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Audiophile2496.html
Its not cheap but if you’re prepared to pay for something that does the job – you can’t go any further than that.
Edited 2009-06-18 11:44 UTC
Accordind to my dad (a very respected sound engineer with around 30 years of experience), the integrated soundcard on his notebook sounds better than an audiophile 24/96. Whether that is true or it’s just my dad angry at that particular soundcard (when he had one he hated it) i’ve no idea. What I do know is I bought an Audiophile 192 (the hi-end product in the audiophile series). and it kicks the 24/96’s ass anytime (i’ve done double blind tests using mp3’s, flacs, LP’s and a very rare 24/96 version of the dark sideof the moon).
If your going to spend that much money on a soundcard i’d recommend spending the extra 30-40 dolars the audiophile 192 costs.
Just my opinion though =)
Keep in mind that m-audio isn’t very good at releasing driver updates, at least i’m still waiting for a decent 64 bit vista driver to come out of their webpage
Edited 2009-06-20 09:08 UTC
IIRC BeOS did not glitch in the audio department, but
it has been a while since I used it (7 years ago)
Maybe Microsoft should rebuild their dismal scheduler
and give the audio path a slightly higher priority than the virus-checker, screen-saver, the all else blocking bloody disk access, or the countless of useless background services.
And flog creative and other mfg for their sucky drivers.
10 ms is a very long time. the mouse gets polled at that frequency.
It is 25 million clockcycles on a modern cpu (2.5GHz)
Edited 2009-06-17 14:27 UTC
I’ve used BeOS as my primary since about 1997-8. In all of those years, I have only noticed ONE audio/video glitch that didn’t involve running dozens of videos simultaneously 🙂
The one glitch was caused when my hard drive failed while playing back an episode of… probably… “The Simpsons” or “South Park.”
Other than that, no glitches. VLC is my player, naturally. And it does well on Windows XP, but I still get glitches from time to time ( such as when inserting a CD while playing a movie!??! – USB does not cause it ).
Windows Vista didn’t change anything, same exact glitches… just a little less extreme.
I never thought of checking that out with Windows 7, but I’ll be replacing my XP partition with 7 shortly – I have to stay ahead, naturally.
–The loon
Funny… I do have video glitches on linux now and then if the system is heavily taxed – the graphical system really needs some work (and it’s getting it). But audio glitches? Can’t remember anything like that for many many years…
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I haven’t had any problems with audio glitching in years, probably at least 5. Back when I had my 300mhz celeron was the last time I still experienced glitches (listening to music it would glitch if I opened certain programs).
Ever since I got 1ghz+ machines I haven’t had a problem. Certainly not now with multicore machines. I wonder what kind of computers really have this problem. They mention 4.3% of reporting users, but don’t really get into much detail on their hardware config. Or maybe they’re so loaded down with crapware that their systems are being overwhelmed.
Either that or simply the fact that their machines have crappy integrated audio chips with even more crappy drivers. Drivers can make the difference between having a great computer experience and one which pushes the end user to wanting to leave home and join the Armish.
It reminds me when I had a computer from HP who went with the worlds most awful audio company; the drivers were bloated, unstable and unreliable – the over all experience convinced me never to purchase a PC again. This goes way off course but maybe Microsoft should spend more time on getting their OEM’s to choose decent hardware vendors with quality hardware so that end users aren’t laden with half baked crap in their system when purchased.