Audio Problems

[EdwardATeller]

I have just started to have some funny audio problems. The sound gets stuttery, and CPU activity makes it worse. SageTV is mostly immune to this, but it happens occasionally with it, but WinAmp is almost unlistenable. I'll post more info as I go along, but I've tried removing ffdshow and ACfilter, but that didn't help much. Setting STV to use the default wave device fixed most of the problems with it, but WinAmp is still screwy.

The main thing I did recently was add another HVR-1600. Maybe the system is overloaded now. I don't have any extra PCI slots, but perhaps I could replace a PCI NIC with a USB NIC, and then throw an audio card in the freed up slot. I had also suspected a hot motherboard (38C), so I reworked the airflow, and I have it down to 30C. Problem actually got worse after that, with STV having the stutter as well. That was when I switched to the default wave renderer in the Setup screen, which mostly fixed the STV problem.

[Conejo]

Strange. Audio playback is the LAST thing that goes wrong on any system I've worked on. It's usually rock solid even when I have video stutter or frame skipping.

Have you looked at your codec merits using DirectShow Filter Manager?

[EdwardATeller]

I think I solved the problem. The hard drive with my MP3 files was in PIO, instead of DMA mode. I had also noticed Winamp visualizations were jerky. Uninstalling and reinstalled the IDE channel has cleared up both problems for the time being.

EDIT: My primary IDE channel switched back to PIO mode today. More like PITA mode. This KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472

sort of describes my situation, going into PIO mode after resuming from Standby (S3). The only problem is that I have SP2 installed, and that's supposed to fix it. The hotfix discussed in the KB article can only be run on SP1. I did modify the Registry as discussed in the KB, plus I changed the IDE cable. Hopefully that will fix it.

EDIT 2: Two days later, and so far, so good. No PIO mode, but I see that the controller is downshifted to Ultra DMA Mode 2, vs. Mode 5. It's not my video drive, so maybe that doesn't matter much. Anything is better than PIO.