Crackles during MP3 playback

[bolo]

I have been a die hard fan of qcd for a couple years and never had any problems. I upgraded my soundcard to a hercules game theater xp. Now mp3's are crackly when playing in qcd player. tried all three playback methods in the new version and messed with the buffers. No dice. It only does this with qcd player and only with mp3's. I can play the same file in WMP with no problems. Since qcd SPANKS WMP i figured there is some tweak i am just not thinking of. Please help me... I dont want to have to go back to WMP. :mad:

WinXP Pro, AMD 2200+, 512 PC2700.

Thanks,
Bolo

[Hanzo]

I have been a die hard fan of qcd for a couple years and never had any problems. I upgraded my soundcard to a hercules game theater xp. Now mp3's are crackly when playing in qcd player. tried all three playback methods in the new version and messed with the buffers. No dice. It only does this with qcd player and only with mp3's. I can play the same file in WMP with no problems. Since qcd SPANKS WMP i figured there is some tweak i am just not thinking of. Please help me... I dont want to have to go back to WMP. :mad:

WinXP Pro, AMD 2200+, 512 PC2700.

Thanks,
Bolo
Have you checked your driver settings and audio settings on XP?

[bolo]

Have you checked your driver settings and audio settings on XP?

Thanks for responding.. yeah. all seems fine. Passes all directsound tests. crackles with mp3 and other compressed audio formats. crystal clear with a cd. WMP plays much clearer but still crackles a little. My old sound card sounded flawless with no special settings but it doesnt have all the cool features of the game theater!! i disabled the old one on the motherboard and the drivers are all gone. Everything is setup to use the game theater and i have all the latest drivers. i even tried several older drivers and no dice. it sounds skippy and crakly during silent passages. Is there a buffer change or something that would help?? What have I forgotten about?

[Paul]

Since you said it only does the crackle with MP3s and on all playback plugins, the source must be from the MP3 decoder. Two things: 1) try turning off the EQ 2) try the alternate mp3PRO decoder (in input plugins)

(but still not sure why only you get noise)

[MrZebra]

I have a similar problem, with OGG files. Well, if his problem is what I think it is that is...

I'm using a Celeron 850, WinME, Built-On-Board SoundCard.

I noticed when some application I use repaints it's window, it does some skippimng. Sounds like the buffer is not kept full. I'm using the DirectSound Crossfader with buffer at maximum and also another sign that it could be a buffer problem is that sometimes it would switch to the next song without fading.

Could it be that the Thread Priority of the Output Plug-In (Which is not configurable) is set too low?

[Paul]

I have a similar problem, with OGG files. Well, if his problem is what I think it is that is...

I'm using a Celeron 850, WinME, Built-On-Board SoundCard.

I noticed when some application I use repaints it's window, it does some skippimng. Sounds like the buffer is not kept full. I'm using the DirectSound Crossfader with buffer at maximum and also another sign that it could be a buffer problem is that sometimes it would switch to the next song without fading.

Could it be that the Thread Priority of the Output Plug-In (Which is not configurable) is set too low?
If the crackling is happening during high drawing load (scrolling, etc...) then your video card is saturating the bus. QCD can't get any cycles. I don't think there is anything I can do about circumventing an overly agressive video driver.

[bolo]

If the crackling is happening during high drawing load (scrolling, etc...) then your video card is saturating the bus. QCD can't get any cycles. I don't think there is anything I can do about circumventing an overly agressive video driver.

yeah since ogg files are a higher compression than mp3's i can see where system resources could come into play. That is not the case with my problem. After further exploration of the problem i think the problem is the game theater xp sound system itself. I have the newest drivers and the hardware is installed correctly so it must be either a physical problem with the hardware or some configuration. i tend to think it is some configuration since only compressed audio files sound skippy. EIther some buffer or directsound thing or driver is not getting along with xp or there is still something left of my old audio driver in xp. i am waiting for hercules support to help since i think the problem is unrelated to qcdplayer. Thanks to all that responded. Any other suggestions would be welcome especially from those of u who have a game theater xp sound system.

Thanks,

Bolo

[Paul]

yeah since ogg files are a higher compression than mp3's i can see where system resources could come into play. That is not the case with my problem. After further exploration of the problem i think the problem is the game theater xp sound system itself. I have the newest drivers and the hardware is installed correctly so it must be either a physical problem with the hardware or some configuration. i tend to think it is some configuration since only compressed audio files sound skippy. EIther some buffer or directsound thing or driver is not getting along with xp or there is still something left of my old audio driver in xp. i am waiting for hercules support to help since i think the problem is unrelated to qcdplayer. Thanks to all that responded. Any other suggestions would be welcome especially from those of u who have a game theater xp sound system.

Thanks,

Bolo
I don't think it's the compressed music that is the issue, that is effortless for most systems. It's the bandwidth required to send the audio across the bus to the soundcard. I have experienced video drivers that saturate the bus's bandwidth on intense drawing (like scrolling IE) which can starve the audio card.

[bolo]

I don't think it's the compressed music that is the issue, that is effortless for most systems. It's the bandwidth required to send the audio across the bus to the soundcard. I have experienced video drivers that saturate the bus's bandwidth on intense drawing (like scrolling IE) which can starve the audio card.

yeah this is true but the crackle happens all the time regardless. And it was fine with my onboard sound card. It cant be the hardware because audio cd's play fine. just dont get why mp3's play better in WMP?? Also midi files play really crackly in every program including WMP, qcd, power tab, etc. Another curious thing, when playing with the buffers in qcd, where it says condition: sounds good i get a lot of buffer below min. I have to raise the buffer size to keep the sounds good constant. No matter what i do the quality doesnt change. I am completely frustrated and still havent heard from hercules support. Youd think that a two hundered dollar sound card would sound better than my cheap onboard one!!! My conclusion thus far is that something is not configured or installed exactly right and qcd merely exploits it more. Dont think there is any bugs on pauls part. ;) As i said midis play horrible using anything.

u guys are great for trying to help!! anything other ideas from the qcd master or fellow users??

[Tokelil]

I have experienced video drivers that saturate the bus's bandwidth on intense drawing (like scrolling IE) which can starve the audio card. How can a AGP graphiccard saturate the PCI bus? Id think the only thing that could do that would be the harddrives. Or are you talking about the CPU -> Northbridge bus which seems unlikely to be saturated by a graphic card unless running 3D.

BTW is hardware wave tables still used on highend soundcards for midi?

Bolo: Have you tried moving your soundcard to another PCI slot? (Example: If you have it in the PCI slot next to the AGP slot they'll share IRQ which could be a reason for the sound card not to get enough CPU cycles.)

[bolo]

How can a AGP graphiccard saturate the PCI bus? Id think the only thing that could do that would be the harddrives. Or are you talking about the CPU -> Northbridge bus which seems unlikely to be saturated by a graphic card unless running 3D.

BTW is hardware wave tables still used on highend soundcards for midi?

Bolo: Have you tried moving your soundcard to another PCI slot? (Example: If you have it in the PCI slot next to the AGP slot they'll share IRQ which could be a reason for the sound card not to get enough CPU cycles.)

thanks for your suggestion. I have bios set to use acpi for IRQ allocation so there are never any conflicts. i looked to be sure. i moved the pci card down a slot and cleaned the inside of the box and the pci card. Same old story... good suggestion though

[acozz]

Do you have the newest DirectX?

[bolo]

Do you have the newest DirectX?

yeah i do.

a buddy just told me that high end sound cards like to try to share irq's even with acpi. it is sharing with a usb port. i am going to try to clear it up... thanks

[bolo]

yeah i do.

a buddy just told me that high end sound cards like to try to share irq's even with acpi. it is sharing with a usb port. i am going to try to clear it up... thanks

even on its own irq it still sounds the same. it was worth a try...

any other suggestions.

[MrZebra]

If the crackling is happening during high drawing load (scrolling, etc...) then your video card is saturating the bus. QCD can't get any cycles. I don't think there is anything I can do about circumventing an overly agressive video driver.
The program that causes it is a XWindow client to run Linux apps remotely and display them on my machine. Through that, I'm running some kind of file manager-like program and when I change folder to one that has a lot of files it skips during display.

What hints me that it's not the video card is that it's the only time where I notice a slow down, scrolling in Explorer doesn't cause this. And add to that the fact I've noticed this only since the last version of QCD, which is why I think it could be the Output Plugin that was updated with a different thread priority. And the fact that it's not just the send to soundcard that is problematic, it's the buffer that doesn't get full and crossfading doesn't work properly (Squarely jumps to the next song on some occasions)

I tried increasing the Process Priority of QCD and didn't see a change. I run Seti@home in the background but that is set to Idle Priority so it can't be preventing QCD from keeping it's output buffer full.

I know the video AND soundcard are built-on-board, I don't think my version of Direct X is up to date on that system so I could check that.

I'll try changing the output to Simple DS or WaveOut to see if it still happens.