awful clicking audio on PC

ok guys help me out here....

if u might recall i built a PC about a year ago with p good specs

4.0ghz xeon

32gb ram

250ssd

3tb hdd for all my music

i'm running foobar, u know the media player that is supposed to be FANTASTIC and super LIGHTWEIGHT... meanwhile I barely read flacs off my HDD without stuttering and clicking every fucking second. it's gotten worse too.

now I will say that my "soundcard" is a kontrol s4 via usb and then to some M1 studio monitors. The drivers are up to date etc. Is this a kontrol issue or a foobar issue or a RAM issue? I'd hope that a computer like this would be able to read flacs and browse the web at the same fucking time. I have never felt any other performance problem either, running games, complex modeling etc.

What is the problem here? should i get a new soundcard? any suggestions?

thanks i love u all,

d-lo

does foobar allow you to muck around with the settings on the decoders/the input stream? maybe experiment with the buffering values or something. I still use Winamp lol.

it could be a sound card issue also. if you have/can get your hands on a second one, try swapping it out and seeing if that fixes the problem.

thnx mang

what im saying is i can only listen to SND and jan jelinek now...

what you're really saying is that you have a box that you can feed any sound into and out comes an instant SND remix. you have an SND remix machine.

edit: or Oval

cut the green wire.

^ lol

That's weird dood, what's your cpu load when it's stuttering? What's the foobar process using for resources (memory/cpu)? Do you have any dsp or other components running? If yr not getting any joy you're best bet would probably be to check out the foobar forum at hydrogenaudio (ironically offline at the moment), chances are there are ppl out there who've run into the same issue so do a forum search like "foobar stuttering flacs" or summat

Sounds like an issue with the soundcard more than anything else. Is the latency set waaay too low causing buffer underruns/clicking ? Try latencymon and see if it throws up any suggestions - http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

did you set foobar to use ASIO?

What is that

it's an input/output protocol, it should be in the options somewhere.

  On 1/12/2016 at 5:07 AM, eugene said:

did you set foobar to use ASIO?

I cant deal with how funny the robbie av is it's like he is speaking to me

.

Playing audio of any format is trivial for any computer built in the last 10+ years. It's even trivial for smartphones. You must have an audio driver/latency issue, or Foobar is not routing audio to the best audio output.

Native Instruments says you should be sure your device is plugged into a USB 3.0 port for best performance, and that your USB drivers are up to date in any case USB 2 or 3.

Latest Windows driver for the Kontrol S4 is 2013. NI says it has ASIO driver support, so...

In Foobar preferences (CTRL+P):


If you have the ASIO driver option, then also go to the next menu down and enable high process priority:

If you don't have ASIO , then use WASAPI and go to "Advanced" and set the highlighted options like this:
("prevent hard disk sleep while playing" should be CHECKED for HDD, UNCHECKED for SSD)


If that doesn't help, then if possible, hook up a set of cheapo PC speakers to the motherboard audio output, and change your Foobar preferences to use that device instead of your USB interface. If Foobar plays fine, then it rules out pretty much everything except your USB audio interface/drivers/configuration.

i was actually thinking that he shouldn't use ASIO if it's enabled because it does get clicky in my experience, on windows 10 at least. use wasapi or DS instead. there's no sound quality difference anyway.

  On 1/12/2016 at 10:50 AM, eugene said:

i was actually thinking that he shouldn't use ASIO if it's enabled because it does get clicky in my experience, on windows 10 at least. use wasapi or DS instead. there's no sound quality difference anyway.

on mine too, fucking asio, it's the only solution for my interface, but it clicks like hell, not simple clicks, glitches!

yes i guess asio is only necessary if you're running a daw or something...

Any of them should work if properly configured. You can see in my screenshot I have two different sound cards (M-Audio Delta 66 and Digigram VX222e) running in ASIO mode, and I have zero playback issues on either of them.

DirectSound is the most "hassle free" but it also up/downsamples and otherwise "messes" with the audio stream before sending it to the device which affects sound quality (although you'd probably never notice) and increases latency. DS has the advantage of being able to mix Windows and any other applications' audio together (even if the sources are different bit-depth and sample rate) so that you can hear all those sounds coming from one set of speakers at the same time. It's fine as long as you don't mind the drawbacks, but I don't use DS because of them. Instead, I route PC audio from the motherboard out to cheap computer speakers for day-to-day things like playing YouTube, games, etc... but when I listen to music, I want to hear it through my dedicated studio monitors without the chance of anything other than Foobar and DAW software coming out of them. Nothing gets your adrenaline pumping like an unexpected "DING!" sound playing at full volume through studio monitors at 2AM. That is where WASAPI and ASIO come in.

ASIO is an old but still current technology that was designed to bypass older versions of DirectSound's terrible mixer/codecs, which had a huge negative effect on sound quality. Windows Vista and later have a MUCH better DirectSound implementation. ASIO gives exclusive sound card access to an application so that it, and only it, can play audio through the device. ASIO when configured properly, has extremely low latency (important for DAWs) and sends bit-perfect audio from the source to the device. Because ASIO connects an audio app directly to the sound card, the sound card settings have to be just right or you'll have glitchy playback.

WASAPI is basically Microsoft's take on ASIO - exclusive access to a sound device without the OS's mixer/codecs standing in between your audio source and destination. It provides ASIO-like functionality to devices that don't come with ASIO drivers, and it provides much lower latency than DS, but usually not quite as low as ASIO.

WASAPI has two modes, Event and Push. Push means the audio application sends data to the sound card, trying to keep the card's buffer filled. Event means the sound card "pulls" data from the audio app whenever the buffer isn't full. Any old audio device should work with Push mode, but Event only works on hardware that supports it.

An ASIO driver usually lets you adjust the size of the audio buffer, and the bigger the buffer the less chance of audio glitches, with the drawback of higher latency. High latency isn't a big deal if you're just PLAYING audio, but is really annoying if you're trying to write music.

In your audio driver, you should see something similar to these examples (from my system). The M-Audio device is a PCI card, and I have to run a bigger buffer (2048) to eliminate glitches. The VX222e is a more powerful PCIe device and I can run with a much lower buffer size (576) without glitches.

Find this setting in your driver's control panel and gradually increase the buffer size until you get glitch-free playback of 24-bit 48kHz audio.

If you don't want to use ASIO, then similar settings for WASAPI are found in Foobar. The "hardware buffer in MS" controls how many milliseconds of audio should be buffered by the device. Try increasing the numbers by 50 at a time until you get clean playback.

One other thing you can try if your motherboard supports it (which I'm sure it does) is to enable HPET (High Precision Event Timer) in your motherboard BIOS. After verifying HPET is enabled in BIOS, you need to configure Windows to only use HPET (it doesn't by default). To enable HPET in Windows, open a CMD prompt (as administrator) and run this command:

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

And then reboot.

Couldn't hurt to try disabling HPET to see if it makes a difference:

bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

Reboot, then disable HPET in your BIOS.

^ thank you so much for all that advice -- i will try this when i get home... i think i might have fixed it myself last night but I'll check again.

  On 1/12/2016 at 5:48 PM, jsmcpn said:

Any of them should work if properly configured. You can see in my screenshot I have two different sound cards (M-Audio Delta 66 and Digigram VX222e) running in ASIO mode, and I have zero playback issues on either of them.

hey tahnks a lot for all that info man :thumbsup:

but i'm really sorry i meant ASIO4ALL, and it doesn't click on playback, it's not a latency issue, it happens only and exactly when the driver starts running or is stopped, for example, when i minimize reaper and play a video on youtube, reaper releases the asio driver and clicks/glitches like hell, and then when i come back to reaper it turns asio on and does it again... i can turn this option off but then reaper doesn't release the driver and that way i can't playback anything out of reaper...

when opening the ASIO4ALL control panel it usually glitches a lot too. i guess it happens when the driver starts running or is stopped... i guess i already said that...

it happens on every program, reaper, cubase, max, live, fl etc, it's definitely an ASIO4ALL issue...

it also happens when closing and opening new projects on a said daw, i guess the daw in question always releases and gets back on the audio driver in use causing the annoying glitches...

When I used ASIO4ALL I seem to remember that being an issue if the sample rate of the DAW was different than the general sample rate used in the OS, it seemed to have issues swapping sample rates so I'd generally make sure everything was set to the same thing.

  On 1/13/2016 at 5:50 PM, mcbpete said:

When I used ASIO4ALL I seem to remember that being an issue if the sample rate of the DAW was different than the general sample rate used in the OS, it seemed to have issues swapping sample rates so I'd generally make sure everything was set to the same thing.

i went trying a few combinations to rule problems out...

turns out even when i just close/open projects (both in the same sample rate) in reaper the problem still happens... :\

it happens right when i open reaper also, and when i close it, meaning, when ASIO4ALL is turned on or off...

It's always the damned wifi adapter/network card, try deactivating it, just for shits n giggles.

ok.... now for some reason WASAPI is buzzy in my right channel. wtf. any vaguely high frequency is buzzy. I can switch back to the regular Kontrol K4 Master and it works fine. so it's not a problem with the hardware, ive switched monitors, cables, channels. things sound fine when NOT using WASAPI... so how did the right channel suddenly get buzzy...

w/e i switched it ASIO and it was fixed... who the fuck knows!!

ok but now it wont play my 190khz aleksi tunez. dang.