does anyone actually have the Sound Stuttering fix?

The problem is defiantly either related to CPU spiking, which is largely related to the front side bus speed, CPU speed, and your amount of cashe. Another issue is the clocking on your sound card, and how much available RAM you have when running your audio programs. It could be all of these, or one of these. Many times I find that multiple factors contribute to degradation of audio performance.

Lastly, spyware and virus programs such as mcafee, and norton put a huge strain on your system resources, especially if you have real time protection on. Do some process of elimination and see. Post results for us.

Here’s more information on my Windows 7 64-bit audio problem. I have a head full of trials and processes, I will try to be clear and concise, but I may ramble. Bear with me:

I bought a new computer (3.46ghz quad core with 12GB RAM.) I loaded Office 2010 and foobar, and connected a network plug for my internet. I let the updates load. Next I plugged in my PS Audio Digital Link III for audio (it’s a USB digital to analog converter) and then plugged in a couple external hard drives with my music (all in FLAC.) Started Foobar, selected my music, and the problems started there. I get an audio drop-out every few minutes, sometimes twice in a minute, sometimes not until 10 minutes. Totally random, and the drop out lasts a quarter second, it’s like a skip. So my issue started right out of the box.

I load up DPC latency checker. Pretty much green bars all the way, average of about 300. It might peak at 1000 from time to time, but it doesn’t correlate to the audio skip or a process turning on (according to task manager.) So my latency is ok, and I’m not seeing my drop-out corresponding to a rise in latency.

I do a clean-boot and turn off everything non-Microsoft. Still have the problem. I continue trying a clean-boot turning off virtually everything that isn’t necessary. Still no fix.

(All this time I’m tracking Task-Manager to see if I can see a process turn on that corresponds to the drop-out. I don’t see anything. I have task manager sorted by CPU usage, see no spikes, the numbers look like I’m running smooth. My CPU is idling between 93-96% when problems happen.)

In task manager, I start turning off everything one at a time until I’m down to barebones. The problem still persists. In task manager, I also don’t see any nVIDIA processes running. I turned off a process called SeaPort, and that seemed to fix the problem for a long time. But it came back. I even changed the filename of seaport.exe so that it wouldn’t magically come back on.

I’ve gone into Device Manager and disabled multiple items to no avail. I have turned off the nVIDIA sound drivers and two other sound drivers that were present. Everything except the USB codec that loads when I plug in my USB DAC. I have tried using the other two sound drivers instead of the USB codec, and they have the same issue.

I have the same issue whether I play music from Foobar or a CD directly from the CD player on the computer (I don't remember what program I used to play it.) I loaded up winamp to see if that had a problem – it does. I have set the buffer on Foobar to maximum, and tried various settings in between. I saw a thread where somebody was able to fix their [windows 7] problem by adjusting the sample rate on Foobar, but I’m not sue how that will fix audio from applications like youtube which has the same drop-outs. No, there is no affect on video, just audio.

I’ve tried to update various drivers, but windows says they are up to date. I haven’t tried to uninstall/reinstall drivers because that’s getting a little too technical for me and I don’t want to kill my computer. For instance I’ve seen threads where it’s stated that nVIDIA drivers may not be too good, but if I uninstall my video card driver it seems that I wouldn’t have any display to look at to reinstall it. Hope that sounds funny to someone. And as for sound card drivers, I don’t believe I can update my “plug and play” USB audio device. I’ve also seen threads about updating chipset drivers, that sounds a little too complicated for me as well. But if that’s what it takes, and it’s a silver bullet, I can certainly Google it and figure it out.

No, I haven’t tried windows media player yet. Not sure why, but it doesn’t make sense that everything else is having issues.

I tried disconnecting my network cable, nope. I don’t have any torrent software on my computer either. I did load Skype though, maybe if I unload that?

I have McAfee antivirus. I turned off the live scan portion and that didn’t do anything. I think I turned everything off on it too, and that didn’t do anything.

I don’t have any “crackling” or static, just a quarter second drop-out that will drive you insane. And it’s completely random.

I’ll end this by saying that I have been running USB audio through my old XP machine for four years without any issues. Sigh.

Thanks for reading this far. Hope this helps somebody, and I would appreciate any advice someone is willing to share.

Even though it's a new machine... is there a more recent BIOS update for the motherboard?
I have no sound issues but I'm running in 32 bit mode.

I have a lot of experience setting up windows machines for audio, the Win 7 machine I'm using now does very well, able to stream multiple sources... Youtube, Winamp, CD at the same time without glitching or dropouts but Win7 has been problematic for many.

With all of that memory try setting a "static" swap file, make the minimum and maximum size equal, 2 or 4 gigabytes should be fine.

Shut OFF Indexing on all drives, shut down any real-time virus checking including Windows Defender located in "Services" until you find out what's causing the dropout.

Since my machine is used for audio I've gone to extremes...but man... does this thing run great.

People get sick of seeing these so here's the last pics I'll post on the matter.




I have two virus/malware checkers (Malware Bytes and Spyware Doctor/Antivirus) and I run them manually.

You might take a look at your services to see if there's any nVidia or other useless processes running.

Ap

Is there a fix for it? It mostly stutters when i get a virus update from Advast... someone suggested to update the driver itself but how would it be done?

I had the same problem for the last 2 months. It drove me mad.

I went through everything and disabled my wireless driver as i dont use wireless. This done the ticket and everything is back as sweet as a nut.

This might help you.

i attached a picture of the update that sound stuttered my cpu, videos and audio streams and files were stuttering, thanks to the DPC latency checker...

Windows 7 Home Prem 64-bit upgrade from Vista Home Prem 64bit

Hi,

I suffered this for a long time with no fix and blamed win 7 and the sound software I was using ( amazing slow downer) the stutter was occasional with no apparent trigger -the fix was simple when I sorted what processes were running, I run AVG antivirus and Windows had also activated the Windows Firewall - I switched off the Windows Firewall and my problem disappeared. No other programs seemed to be affected and when I had the stutter the processor activity stopped completely.

Im having the same issue again with a brand new PC.

Intel Core i7 3.4 Gh
4 RAM DDR3 1333mhz.
MOBO asus P8P67 Pro.
Windows 7 32 bits ultimate.

Im using the SRS audio sand box in order to improve the audio of my omega striker 7.1

No audio latency issues.