audiodg.exe uses 3GB of Memory when iTunes is playing..

When I have iTunes running, audiodg.exe uses high CPU and memory usage. Anyone know a fix?

If you have a Creative Labs Xi-Fi card, go to:

Playback Devices...Speakers Properties...Soundblaster tab

and check the box to disable Sound Blaster enhancements.

There is a memory leak caused by the 3D enhancement and possibly other enhancements to the Xi-Fi cards which causes this problem - audiodg doesn't release back memory handles it uses with the enhancements are active, or something like that. Techies could explain it better.

If you have your Task Manager open before you do this, and open up the Resource Manager, you will see you memory usage come down very quickly as soon as you disable the enhancements, and it's all down to audiodg.exe releasing the memory back.

I had this same issue...the memory used by audiodg grows over a few hours and eventually causes much disk thrashing (presumably as other apps get dumped to the swap file to make room), and sound stops working on other aps. Not until audiodg comes back under control does the sound return to the other aps.

Creative Labs should be castrated for this, as I quite like the Crystalizer effect on iTunes playback, but can't trust using it without the machine crawling to a halt.

I don't. I have an IDT HDA card.

OK, in which case you need to find out whether that is causing the problem.

Are there enhancements for that which can be disabled using a dedicated tab in the same way as I decribed below? e.g. on an IDT HDA tab within the speakers playback properties?

If so try what I suggested below. Something is writing to audiodg.exe and not releasing the memory so it will be related to your sound drivers somehow and you need to find out what's causing it so you can stop it.

On mine, you can literally see the memory use start growing all the way up to over 1.5GB as soon as you enable the enhancements. Disable them and the growth stops. With them disabled on my machine the memory use for that file never grows much above 10 MB after a fresh start, which is as it should be.