Useful program to analyse cause for dropouts while playing audio.

[admin_exported]

Hi,

Thought I'd share my beginners experience so far, with my (temporary) laptop with mediamonkey > asio > MF V-DAC > stereo.

I found a useful link if you want to check if your Windows system can be expected to play audio without hickups. I had some occasional dropouts, but the laptop is full of installed programs that might interfere by getting online information etc, and I'm also browsing, ripping and what not while playing, so I was not surprised. But I found a very useful dpc latency test program to test Windows' lack of responsiveness due to bad drivers that might get in the way of realtime audio playback. Result: every 5 secs a spike (yellow: just below the critical level but nevertheless), that went away after disabling the unused gigabit ethernet driver. Perhaps is was checking if had connected a cable in the mean time? And less dropouts so it seems so far.

Pete10

 

[Messiah]

Nice one!

 

[Anonymous]

Yes, thanks for that.

 

[Anonymous]

Now that I am playing around with my new DAC, I ran this program on my laptop (Asus EEEPC1000H, Windows XP SP3) to see what was what. Although there didn't appear to be an audible problem, the latency checking software did reveal a spike occurring every 30 seconds. After a fair bit of experimentation, I have traced this to the following in Device Manager:

Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery

I disabled this, and was left with a DPC latency of.... zero according to DPC Latency Checker.

The other way round this is simply to run the laptop off AC power with the battery removed.

Out of interest, can anyone tell me what this battery driver does, and whether disabling it will have any adverse effects I should be aware of?

 

[PJPro]

Yeah, I downloaded it and gave it a try. My Compaq Core 2 Duo got a clean bill of health. Having said that, I was hardly taxing the PC at the time....although I rarely do anyway. Oodles of power for web browsing.

 

[up the music]

Nice one, useful tool. Now I need to figure what drivers and processes are causing Vista to spend most of it's time with it's processor running near 100% and over 8Ms latency so much of the time. Since my last reboot it's behaving beautifully though.