Stuttering on music playback.

[proaudioguy]

Music playback stutters on W700. The music is located on a local drive. Now I didn't have this problem at all with Windows XP on my old X32 unless I was loading a facebook page or something like that. Even then it was NEVER this severe.

It's a quad core, windows 7 Ultimate, 4 GB of Ram. It should have no trouble playing music, surfing the web, virus scanning, rendering photoshop effects, all at the same time. What gives? The music is on a Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM Sata HDD, the OS is on an SSD. The drives are not full either. One of the main uses for this computer is music playback. I need to be able to playback multiple tracks simultaneously. If it won't even playback a stereo WAV without stuttering (playing the same 500ms to 1second passage over and over for 4-5 seconds before moving on), then it's completely useless and basically a very heavy paper weight.

Any ideas?

[dr_st]

Probably a bad driver keeping the system in high IRQ level, which stalls the music. I'd guess one of the network drivers, cause I have heard reports of similar bugs in the past. Try disabling them to see if it persists.

[proaudioguy]

Probably a bad driver keeping the system in high IRQ level, which stalls the music. I'd guess one of the network drivers, cause I have heard reports of similar bugs in the past. Try disabling them to see if it persists.

Do I go into the device manager and look at network devices and just disable all of them? This is NOT good because I need to be on the network when I'm playing back. The music is not for casual listening. Playing back music is this computers number one job, but it has lots of other jobs too.

So how to solve an issue like that assuming that's the problem?

[dr_st]

Obviously it is only suggested as a way to determine the cause, not the solution. It may not be the network drivers after all. I just suggested it, cause I've heard of such a problem before, related to network drivers.

I would try disabling the devices in the devices manager, the services, and the processes that run in the background until you find out the culprit. Then think how to deal with it.

[proaudioguy]

OK thanks. Is there any fear of instability that would cause a failure by disabling something? Should I perform a full disk image first?

[dr_st]

Wouldn't hurt, and would definitely be easier that keeping track of every individual thing you've disabled and enabled...

[Colonel O'Neill]

Try running dpclat from http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

The spikes in DPC latency will probably match the stuttering in playback, which would support the IRQ issues and driver issues.

Personally, my T400 has a red bar regularly every 10 seconds, and when it's especially bad (haven't found a connection between drivers and latency yet) my music will glitch momentarily as well.

[proaudioguy]

Try running dpclat from http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

The spikes in DPC latency will probably match the stuttering in playback, which would support the IRQ issues and driver issues.

Personally, my T400 has a red bar regularly every 10 seconds, and when it's especially bad (haven't found a connection between drivers and latency yet) my music will glitch momentarily as well.

Thank you for posting!!! I think this will be a very useful utility for me, not just for this issues but for the future. I really appreciate it.

[proaudioguy]

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/2z ... directlink

This is what I got just playing a 2 track wav file. Of course when I opened photoshop to paste the screen shot I got lots of red, but I did nothing during the time this was happening. I have disabled all that was recommended and it made no difference so I'm thinking either the video driver or audio driver. The music is on a second HDD as I said. It's not on the same disc as the OS. The OS is on an SSD.

Any more ideas? I have less than 2 weeks to get this fixed or I am screwed.

[Vempele]

Intel wireless gives me yellow spikes exactly like yours (I have a T60, though). Windows Media Player stutters, but iTunes is unaffected.

Why haven't you tried disabling the audio driver?

And you can try the generic Windows graphics driver - device manager, update driver, ... select from a list of installed drivers.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I get identically looking yellow level spikes on my T400 with an Intel 5300.
It's better if I use RMClock to lock the CPU at a higher clock, and worse at a lower clock (At SuperLFM the spikes go red! )

But I digress; is this on a self-installed Windows or the preload? If it is self-installed, you can try reloading the preload (perhaps extract the WIM to a second partition and adding a boot entry using EasyBCD, which I confirm is a way to get the original image without wiping my current install).

If it is the preload... try a bootable BartPE and play music from there?

You could try the whole gauntlet of music players: WMP, WinAmp, iTunes, VLC... but that wouldn't help much.

Also, its kinda sad to get better DPC lats (and no spikes) on a W2000 Virtual Machine in VMWare. QQ

EDIT: Wow... my latencies are fail:
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/4408/47536943.png

[proaudioguy]

You guys don't understand. I'm not using ANY of the music players you guys use. The basic version of the player I'm using costs $150. Others cost far more. I have to be able to hit a button and have an audio clip (sometimes music, sometimes not) play right then and there instantly on cue. If it's a half a second late, I'll have a comment directed at me, if it happens a few times, I'll be fired. Blaming the PC is not the answer. There are thousands doing what I do for a living and we don't get to blame the tools. Besides, my 2005 X32 doesn't have this issue at all. I was hoping to use an 8 output box and drive 4 simultaneous stereo streams. Most of the times the audio clips must start playing somewhat into the file, not at the beginning.

I haven't disabled the audio, because if I disable the audio, I will have no audio. How does that solve my problem? I need the audio in the $6400. computer to WORK. I will try the WIFI card, I can live without that, but it's inconvenient. I would still need the wired network though. Keep the suggestions coming. I'll keep you posted.

[proaudioguy]

OK guys, it seems clear the Yellow Bar every 10 seconds is the WIFI card. Now I just need to figure out how to make the frequent RED bars go away. Those are the nasty ones. Those don't usually show up if I'm idle. Right now as I type they are coming up every so often in between the yellow bars.

Is there a way to FIX the WIFI issue though? It is the 5300 AGN.

Edit: Correction. I ditched the HP imaging software (something I never wanted), but kept hte HP print driver and the yellow blips went away even with the WIFI enabled. I'm still getting the random RED blips.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Oops... I forgot the professional context XD

Have you tried checking DPC latencies in an alternate OS, be it dual-booted, from BartPE?
Or safe mode? I haven't tried the latency tool in Safe Mode, but it's simplicity means it should be able to run in Safe Mode.
If DPC latency is okay in Safe Mode, it suggests a driver/program acting up.

Did you install all of the necessary drivers through Lenovo System Update 4? Check again for updated drivers, etc.

If so, go to Lenovo Power Manager under Advanced, set the Maximum CPU Speed under System setting to Highest mode and see if the red blips persist.

[proaudioguy]

Oops... I forgot the professional context XD

Have you tried checking DPC latencies in an alternate OS, be it dual-booted, from BartPE?
Or safe mode? I haven't tried the latency tool in Safe Mode, but it's simplicity means it should be able to run in Safe Mode.
If DPC latency is okay in Safe Mode, it suggests a driver/program acting up.

Did you install all of the necessary drivers through Lenovo System Update 4? Check again for updated drivers, etc.

If so, go to Lenovo Power Manager under Advanced, set the Maximum CPU Speed under System setting to Highest mode and see if the red blips persist.

OK 10-4, I'll get right on that. Not sure how I might install an alternate OS for boot purposes since I have no media. I forgot to mention before there is no preload for Windows 7. I have the preload for Vista available. I could try that on an alternate HDD when I get back from the next trip.

FYI I uninstalled the rest of the HP drivers and that has made a big difference as far as I can tell. The red blips are not showing up as often, and the yellow blips are all but gone. Of course I can't print! Once I get my itunes server computer (an old A31) setup at home (none professional use), I suppose I could install the printer there and just SHARE it.

[san]

I am not really sure if this is happening on the onboard audio or you already have your external audio interface hooked up ? If the latter is the case, please let me know what make and model and how it is connected to your laptop.

[proaudioguy]

This is happening with the on board audio. I had planned on using both for now since I can, and since this gives me another pair.

Currently I'm using a MOTU 8pre. It only has 2 stereo pairs of analog outputs, but it has 4 more pairs of digital output, which I can plug via light pipe directly into many of the consoles.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Safe mode under W7 would bypass the loading of any non-critical drivers. If the latencies are a-okay there, then it'll be just a matter of disabling drivers and restarting (might kill a few read cycles on the SSD though). Otherwise, it might be a hardware problem. An alternative to disabling drivers is to disable hardware access in BIOS to various components to see if the lag goes away.

I have EPSON drivers rather than HP drivers, but I dunno if that's also causing issues.

By the way, do you also see your HDD light flash once every few seconds even though it looks idle? Mine will flash every few seconds or so, and I don't know if the thing is in sync with latency spikes. (It's also most likely chewing battery power.) It's probably less pronounced for an SSD; read/writes should happen really really quickly.

Or have a chat with a Lenovo techie while under your warranty.

[proaudioguy]

Started in safe mode but then the dbc program doesn't run.

The HD flashes don't seem to correspond with the issue. It would be hard to tell during music playback since the music is streaming off the HDD. Typing in these windows to post always seems to bring a spike or two, but it could be coincidence. If I just sit and watch it now that I've eliminated the HP driver, it doesn't seem to blip as much. The yellow blips are pretty much gone. I have software that is video intense that I'd like to be running at the same time and when that's going it really goes nuts. I'm really wondering if it's the video driver. The act of resizing that window even with the software not running, causes lots of spikes.

Edit.....
Turning Power manager all the way up seems to solve that issue the rest of the way. I had the slider down just enough not to DIM the screen. Whoa, while I was typing that I got a red spike all the way to the top so I just don't know.

[proaudioguy]

Here is something strange. I opened another piece of software that allows me to see meters and frequency response. The internal mic is fed to both left and right. Tapping on the mic does NOT get the same response on the meters. It acts as if they are almost randomly getting the signal at different timing. Could be a software glitch I suppose.

[san]

Hmm , try this tool to disable Nvidia powermizer - this has been known to cause troubles:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=273276

[Colonel O'Neill]

Maybe try Diagnostic startup under MSCONFIG.

It's a step up from Safe Mode that loads a lot more of the OS. The DPC lat tool will 99% run in that situation. From there, I probably would think the DPC lat would persist if it is a more critical system driver, and it would disappear if the issue lies in a higher, less significant driver.

[rkawakami]

@proaudioguy: This may not help for your particular application but it's something similar that I just ran into...

I have a USB FM radio stick (Silicon Labs reference design) plugged into my T23 (1.2Ghz, 1GB RAM, WinXPP, 51 processes). Not even sure if the radio is supposed to be used with a USB 2.0 port but since I'm running it on the T23, the transfers are at 1.1 speeds. Sometimes, depending upon the other programs that are running, the radio badly stutters. After looking at the CPU usage in Task Manager (only 1 or 2% is being used by the radio), it hit upon me that I could change the program's priority. When the program is set to "AboveNormal", the audio stream is almost seamless, even when loading graphics-heavy pages in Firefox or transferring files via FTP. Yeah, the other programs may slow down a little bit but the radio now sounds a whole lot better.

[QFoam]

Whenever you're trying to run a critical real-time application, you want to make sure it's running at a high priority, and you want to make sure you aren't running anything that interrupts machine operation such as hard-drive indexing, real-time antivirus operations, etc. If the hard drive is active when you're not doing anything on the computer, that's a sure sign of such activity. You're almost certainly running Microsoft's hard drive indexing in the background. The machine's power setting should be set for highest performance, which means you probably want to be plugged into AC power.

I would also eliminate any unneccessary background processes. Go into the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del), order the processes alphabetically. Check/lookup each one, making sure it's not something that you loaded unneccessarily while installing peripherals, etc., and that runs in the background all the time. Uninstall such things that you don't absolutely need. Also look at what's listed in the Task Scheduler. In Vista, you can look for unneccessary icons in the System Tray. Run as few applications as possible while running your real-time application. If you have some sort of read-ahead buffer setting for your audio-playing application, try setting it to the max.

If you're seeing interruptions generated at very regular time intervals, such as every 60 seconds, then you're probably experiencing polling of some hardware device. I've seen such activity for some brands of network cards before, for example. I had to disable them for video production. But that was for add-on cards on older laptops.

I don't have the time to delineate each step to take for all of the above, but you get the picture. Also, you're dealing with Windows 7, and people are still shaking the bugs out of that. Plus you're running your system from SSDs, as I recall, and that's been known to cause stuttering in operation if certain system parameters aren't tweaked. I rarely experience any interruption of video/audio playback on the W700 under Vista 64 installed on the stock hard drive with a dual-core processor. I haven't bothered to do all the above to make this a real-time application machine, but I would if real-time applications were my primary use. From a professional standpoint, you want a lean clean machine when you're working and thus time, money and your reputation are on the line.

Of course, make a full backup image of the system drive for reference/recovery before doing any of the above. You might even be able to install one image when you're on the job, and an alternate image for leisure, depending on how many applications you've installed and thus how fast you can restore from an image.

Also make sure there aren't performance drawbacks to running your HDD in your ultrabay, which as I recall is what you're doing. Try playing music from your SSDs to see if that makes a difference.

And it's a pleasure to see Jack O'Neill in this forum. I pass by Stargate Productions on a regular basis.

[Marin85]

Just two points: As already mentioned by previous posters, your problem might be related to the SSD. (Having said that, if I were you, I would not trust upon SSDs for any mission-critical purposes!) Another thing to look at would be the second HDD (where your music is stored). Since W700 uses specific chipsets/controllers due to its basic RAID capabilities, I would suggest you also to try playing your music from your primary storage device, i.e. the SSD.

Keep us posted.

Marin

[proaudioguy]

Just two points: As already mentioned by previous posters, your problem might be related to the SSD. (Having said that, if I were you, I would not trust upon SSDs for any mission-critical purposes!) Another thing to look at would be the second HDD (where your music is stored). Since W700 uses specific chipsets/controllers due to its basic RAID capabilities, I would suggest you also to try playing your music from your primary storage device, i.e. the SSD.

Keep us posted.

Marin

I never knew you could set the priority of apps individually. Going to look that up right now. The SSD being new, I didn't think any performance hangups would occur so soon, but it's worth checking on. If I shouldn't use the ultrabay (never a problem in slower older models) what about the second internal bay? I can swap all my none critical docks and backups to the ultrabay and put just the music on the second internal bay. Also I have a spare 320GB 7200. I may attempt to install XP on that and run it for work, but that would be going backwards.

[Marin85]

I actually assumed you were using the 2nd internal bay for the Seagate HHD... What I suggested in my previous post, was just some plain hypothesis worth looking at. I don´t know if moving things from the ultrabay to the 2nd internal bay or to the main bay would change anything, but considering the situation it may be well worth a try. You can first try with something small just to test. Also, you could move some small .wav file onto the SSD to see how it is played back there, just for testing purposes...
If I were you, I would not waste time to install XP, because W700 was actually designed to run Vista (or higher). So, if you really decide to install another OS, I think that would be better Vista. Drivers are more or less OS-specific and since Vista has been around for quite a while now, it is thinkable that most drivers flaws have been resolved by now... On the other hand side, Vista and Windows 7 are not that different, so I can´t really tell what you could expect from installing Vista...

[proaudioguy]

Looking back it seems I was using both drives, but not the SSD. However I must say a combination of things seems to be doing the trick. I still get the BSOD once in a while, but I think that is related to a bad 1394 driver for one of my external devices. Of course this device is absolutely needed, but it will suss itself out in time. The manufacturer isn't going out of business any time soon. The biggest difference I can tell right now, without a FULL TEST, is changing priority. It would not allow real time, but it would allow HIGH. It was on Normal. Took me a while to figure out how to do this. I am still considering getting the app that allows me to turn off the power saving functions of the video card. The ridiculous part is I don't need much in the way of video performance during these times, but apparently the constant shifting gears is blamed for this audio issue, at least on a few forums. The times I need the video performance to be high are before the "show" when a bit of stuttering is not an issue. The analysis software I use is very video intense. Anyway at this point the stuttering has turned into a drop out which is very fast, and I'm NOT running all out for testing purposes. In fact I'm going to throttle down and keep testing. I'm also going to run as many apps as I can practically keep track off. When I find the threashold, I'll actually feel better about the whole thing. It's easy to run only the music app and a browser (for those long periods where I'm twiddling my thumbs) during the mission critical times. I just hope I can get this to the point where I can playback multiple files through different outputs at the same time. That was one of the main reasons I got this optioned out screamer (sarcasm).

I've noticed another issue during this time. Firefox seems to have a lot of lag. Like if I right click it takes quite a bit of time to highlight my choices, but not always. Stuff like that actually makes this quad core slower than my single core Dothan that was tweaked in XP to have no operational lag. Any lag that machine had was due to high CPU use.

[proaudioguy]

So I am thoroughly fed up with this piece of crap Lenovo W700ds!!!!

Don't get me wrong it's a wonderful machine but whatever they have driver wise that's causing this stuttering issue (and bosd during work the other day is totally unacceptable!) is going to cause me a huge loss of income. I simply cannot comprehend a quad core laptop skipping when a slower clock, single core X32 has no issues whatsoever. I had intended on playing back numerous streams at once, but this won't even play a single stream dependably.

Does anyone have XP Pro restore discs for this beast? I have Windows 7 Ultimate license (factory upgrade) and Windows Vista license, so I have down grade rights. Having picked it up from the Lenovo Outlet, I'm not certain they will even sell me the discs which I should NOT have to buy, because this problem should NOT be happening. I really wanted to stay 64bit but that too is causing issues in other areas. I can't get drivers for some external devices in a 64bit form. This means I cannot control the processors that I simply must have control of. I think downgrading to XP Pro and taking the hit on Ram is a much better compromise at this point, at least until the world catches up with 64bit and windows and lenovo get their drivers in order. I did not buy this to surf the internet, but even that had lag issues at times. I'll start to scroll a page, and it will lock up and sit there for a second, then go ahead and work. I do not believe it's an SSD issue, (the system drive) because I don't store ANYTHING on the SSD. Only system files are written there if it's by default.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't need an XP license, just the discs to get the OS on the drive.

[dr_st]

I totally feel your frustration. But I still go back to my original advice.

I would try disabling the devices in the devices manager, the services, and the processes that run in the background until you find out the culprit.

You can do this while you wait for XP restore disks.

It is 100% some driver/service problem. Unfortunately, it's really easy to write bad kernel code that will cripple the system, by just not letting anything run, even if you have a zillion cores with a googleplex of RAM.

By going through the trouble to find what it is, you may not be able to get an immediate fix, but at least you will be able to notify Lenovo of the problem, and have them look into it, and eventually it will be solved. So, yeah, it may be too late to help you, and your best bet might still be to install XP, at least for now. But the community will benefit, and my philosophy is that everything which helps the community ends up helping the individuals at the end.

I've had a similarly infuriating issue with my Vista 64bit locking up entirely (to the point where a hard reboot is required) during certain types of network traffic, and sometimes randomly as well. Was driving me crazy, until I've found out that the problem is the wireless PCI card driver, and that many many people with the same wireless chipset experience the same symptoms. We complained to the manufacturer, but they were slow to respond, and eventually I just gave up and bought a different WiFi adapter. However, after several long months, it looks like they did release an updated driver that fixed the problem. Too late to help me, but not too late for others. And if I ever need to use the old adapter, now I can.