Crackling sound and audiodg.exe problems

hannedog said:

Well I have an update on the issue. My system configuration not having changed since the last time I posted, I encountered an isolated incidence of sound popping. It was a relatively mild case, but, I quickly brough up the DPC Latency Checker. I was playing some music in Media Player, using the Internet, etc., the usual stuff.... and, then, it just happened.

While the DPC Latency Checker was up, the intermittent popping continued. And if you look at the attached image, you can see why. Then, suddenly, the popping stopped, corresponding with a drop in the lag spikes. Given that it took me a few seconds to bring up the DPC Latency Checker, it appears this incident lasted about two minutes. I was planning on disabling my network adapter as soon as two minutes had passed on the DPC tool, alas, the lag spikes quit before I had that chance.

Ok, that graphic is the all-time worst DPC latency I've ever seen! Wow! What the h#ll happened?

I see the MYU logo up there, are you running on the school's network? I've heard of problems being caused by system glitches on campus networks.

Ap

Here's my current best DPC latency, taken about 3 minutes after rebooting the computer.




Ap

AntoxaM said:

jonytk said:

For me it solved after deleted malwarebite's antimalware aplication.
It seems that some antivir / anti malware scan the network conecction and could interfiere with each other in my case i had avast antivir and malwarebites.
Also try to turn off the firewall, if you'r behind a router, in your house, it is not needed.

Thanks for suggestion. I turned off real-time protection in MS Security Essentials and problem went away. I'm can listen to music and very happy

Wow! I registered here just to post a THANK YOU that this fixed my problem! I built this system in January, and since day one I've been having these crackling problems EXACTLY as described as in the OP. Finally today I had enough, and searched for a solution. I came here, read this entire thread, and came across your post. I disabled Real Time Protection in MSE and the problem went away instantly... my DPC Latency Checker went from full red bars to full green bars. Kind of sucks though that you have to gimp your AV program to listen to music properly.

Thanks again! I hope anyone who comes across this thread via Google in the future looks to their AV program as the culprit!

[QUOTE=Epical;711878 I came here, read this entire thread, and came across your post. I disabled Real Time Protection in MSE and the problem went away instantly... my DPC Latency Checker went from full red bars to full green bars. Kind of sucks though that you have to gimp your AV program to listen to music properly.

Thanks again! I hope anyone who comes across this thread via Google in the future looks to their AV program as the culprit![/QUOTE]

Thanks for registering to post!

What it shows is that Win-7's audio subsystem is somewhat fragile and easily knocked off track, realtime performance is not good for most users until some optimizations have been performed.

I guess it could be that the OS is still new enough that driver technology hasn't caught up.

Ap

Aphelion said:

Ok, that graphic is the all-time worst DPC latency I've ever seen! Wow! What the h#ll happened?

I see the MYU logo up there, are you running on the school's network? I've heard of problems being caused by system glitches on campus networks.

Ap

Yeah, and this was a relatively mild case of sound popping (in the past, the popping was much more... annoying). Just goes to show that when I was getting sound popping in the past (and especially under Vista), my lag spikes would have been off the charts had I been using the DPC Tool!

Haha, and actually, that's "My U" -- which is for the Universtiy of Minnesota, but, no -- that was just a webpage. I had it up for a couple of hours before the lag popping, doing nothing, actually (although that page does use Java, of course which I have Update 20 on my machine). No network connection or anything funky in that regard. Although, I AM on a personal network, where other roommates' machines are also, all under the standard Windows network framework (Samba is it?)

See, there really was nothing that should have triggered that crazy lag spike. There were no funny background programs running (I checked task manager... no Windows Update or anything else going on, based on cpu usage and I/O usag, didn't seem that search indexer nor windows defender were working (which would realistically be the only two Windows-default "background" programs that would cause conflicts).... everything just seemed normal, except for audio popping / lag spikes...

I had been about an hour earlier playing a little Left 4 Dead 2, with my cards OC'd... which, I've tried all kinds of experiments, there never seems to be any correlation with OC settings and the latency. Anyway, my cards (I have SLI) were still OC'd when the audio popping started -- I then after getting the DPC tool up, turned the OC down (corresponding to about half-way through the lag spikes on my picture a few posts ago -- I actually underclocked to the cards' minimum, which is what I normally have them at when not gaming), but, during the course of changing clock speeds, there was no discernable effect on the DPC lag spikes, as you can see from the graphic, and it made no difference on the audio popping. It just continued... before it just randomly stopped.

I've been having the cracking / suddenly having audiodg.exe taking up 4gb of RAM issue ever since I went to Win7. For the past three hours I've been using Resource Monitor to watch audiodg.exe and I noticed something odd: When running Ventrilo, every single time I've clicked my Push-To-Talk key and the .wav "click" sound plays signaling my mic is active / inactive, the RAM usage of audiodg.exe goes up by a margin. It's not much to start with, but within an hour and a half it's taking up two gigs of RAM.

So if anyone is in Win7 using Ventrilo and Creative drivers, keep tabs on audiodg.exe! Just thought I'd throw the warning out there :)

Aphelion said:

I was looking through all of the services (srv) I've disabled over the past few months.

ThreatFire Srv---------------- is set to manual
Browser Defender Update Srv ----------manual
Block Level Backup Srv-----------------manual
Disk Defragmenter Srv------------------manual
Windows Defender Srv------------------manual
Error Reporting Srv---------------------manual

I use PC Tools Spyware Doctor/Virus to manually check my system each day.
Also use Macrium "Reflect" to image my system disk twice a week (takes 2.5 minutes, great program)

Basically.. I shut everything down possible because I think I can do it better myself. (remains to be seen, so far, so good).

Oh yeah... empty "Task Scheduler".

The main benefit is, a much smoother running system.

p.s. I also have nothing in my startup folder
Also, running msconfig, under the startup tab, no background processes running

Ap

Oh yes, I run a bare minimum when it comes to services / startup programs as well. Only windows services / driver services are allowed to remain. A few of them, such as "Java Quick Starter" or Apple's "Bonjour!" service, I even disable, never allowing them to run, ever!

It's really amazing all the different ways programs can start up with your computer. Sometimes the conventional spots don't help. Using this list: Windows Program Automatic Startup Locations or Autoruns gets rid of pretty much everything else. There has been one program, however, for the life of me I can't figure out how to stop it from running at boot. This is a bit off-topic, but it's the main adobe flash program, which now is called "FlashUtil10e.exe" It doesn't *always* run at boot, but a lot of times does, usually checking to see if there's updates for flash. There's ways you can circumvent it from checking for the update, such as making a file telling it not to, but, that's not actually preventing it from running at startup, it's just preventing it from doing anything when it runs. As far as I can tell, it uses DCOM to be able to run at startup, but, I know too little about how DCOM is configured to actually change anything related to startup behavior. You can view DCOM objects if you type in "services" into the start bar without the ".msc" and then look under "Component Services."

Yes, I know the flash program has little to no ill effects on my startup, but, it's annoying that it happens nonetheless.

I registered as I found this problem mentioned here is the one I'm encountering. I however have NONE of the things you people have and I still have this problem. It just did it a little while ago for a full minute when I was watching a flash video and then it wouldn't come out. I have Logitech Z-5500 speakers so I was afraid it could've been something there but it's going digital coax so there's no chance for distortion or jitter. I powered the speakers on and off and cycled them through a test pattern and I know it's not them, so it is the PC.

Thing is, I'm not using a cheap on-board sound card - I have an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 PCI sound card. I've had this thing forever and it works great, I don't even remember having problems in Vista but in Windows 7 I now get these annoying periodic times where it will start to distort and get crackly (I'd say it's best described like listening to an older analog FM radio and slowly dialing away from the station and it gets more hazy and fuzzy) but it seems to be random and I have no control over it or a clue why it does it! I use the latest drivers from M-Audio but they are SUPER slow making newer drivers (I almost bought an HT Omega because they had no Vista 64-bit drivers when I made that switch but they came through just in time). My drivers were coded for Vista 64-bit SP2 the newest ones they have released 4/20/09. I have all the latest Windows updates too.

I don't have MS Security Essentials or anything, I have Malwarebyes Spyware remover but NOT the anti-virus. I use Avast 5.0 for Anti-Virus and COMODO for Firewall and access permissions and I do have the Windows Firewall disabled. I also use Spybot S&D's TeaTimer which provides protection against changes to registry files (I get pop-ups asking if I want to allow stuff to be changed or not basically). I also run EVGA's Precision Tune program to monitor video card temperature and fan speed.

So what can I do to fix this? This usually happens when I'm not in-game but it has happened while I was playing L4D before and it sucks because I can't do anything but wait for it to stop doing it and I never had the problem in the past. I can't use my on-board sound because A) It's only Optical out and I use Digital Coax as it's the best digital format and has no jitter and is a more stable platform - and B) In all seriousness I have a dedicated high quality sound card...I'm not using the crappy on-board one that doesn't do 24-bit high quality audio - M-Audio makes professional audio equipment and being that I use Reason 4.0 to create music...I pretty much can't use on-board.

So is this something I can do anything about or do I basically have to wait for the M-Audio guys to stop making drivers for all their other products before remembering they still have people using their now discontinued sound cards? This problem drives me nuts and I want to remedy it for good!