"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."
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Member since:2005-12-18
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.
Member since:2006-02-15
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.
Member since:
2005-11-11
"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.