Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Power saving on laptop

h0lden — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:02:58 GMT

I'm experiencing one glitch since Beta.

After few minutes of sound inactivity sound card goes into power saving mode (S3). Now if I want to start some media playback - sound card wakes up in 5-10 seconds. During this time: no sound and media app locks up.

Haven't found workaround for this - setting "High Performance" power profile doesn't help.

HW: SoundMAX integrated digital HD audio

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

oggyb — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:32:40 GMT

How have you tackled the problem whereby wmp will glitch a few seconds from the end of EVERY track in a playlist if those tracks are from an external hard drive?

From a consumer point of view: "how difficult is it to make sure that loading the start of the next track doesn't stall the playback of the current track?!"

It is impossible for me to listen to music in Windows 7 using wmp because of this. The same is not true of wmp11 in Vista.

Serious glitching

TAC4U — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:38:40 GMT

I have an EMU 1820M soundcard and I had very serious audio issues with the Beta release. Basically after a while my sound would permanently distort and the only way to fix it was to change the bit depth / sample rate in Advanced Properties. This would occur frequently, often several times during a 45 minute programme - it was a crippling issue.

Upgrading to post RC1 builds has pretty much eliminated the issues. I have had two occasions - both when launching STALKER: Clear Sky - where it has happened, so it's not completely fixed, but overall it is much more robust.

Hopefully the final build will have further improved the performance and eliminated the issue altogether. Clearly the focus on trying to eliminate the issue has paid off and it's nice to see explained the seriousness in which the manner was handled.

PS - Any chance of fixing the issue where minimising Firefox will cause Windows Live Messenger to popup? It's very irritating. Also, minimising applications will sometimes cause Live Messenger to flash as active when there's no reason for it (both the "fake" profile window and the main window). Considering the focus on so many issue it's surprising to see such an issue slip unattended.

Like every 10-20 sec

Paralityk — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:36:16 GMT

There is a little glitch (like the sound from old recordings) when playing music in my lovely foobar2000 in WMP it's even worse.

Totally BTW why there are only two power plans in tray icon, could you explain us about that? I mostly use High Performance and Power Saver so it's step back from Vista

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Xepol — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:06:06 GMT

Actually, the biggest glitch I experience is when the audio sub-system just flat out dies.

No more sound out of any part of the system - period. No system sounds, no audio, no video audio - NOTHING.

Unfortunately, since the system does not seem to know the audio sub-system is dead, there is never a chance to report it or send in a crash report. It just stops working.

The solution is simple, and yet VERY annoying. I end up rebooting. Sure, Vista might reboot quickly enouhg, but that is because it has moved a fair amount to the post boot, and that can take several minutes to finish and leave a system usable.

If there was a way to completely restart the audio subsystem, it would be VERY helpful. I could use that point to report a problem, diagnostic info could be taken, and MS might start finding out that this is a more common problem than they expect, or narrow it down to a particular vendor/driver issue.

If I was to ask for anything in the future of Windows Audio, it would be for a way to totally restart the audio stack manually. Unload the drivers, unload the libraries along the way and rebuild it all from the ground up so that sound could start working again without a reboot.

(for those who are tempted to suggest my volume is down or speakers are off, please don't. Trust me, I've covered all of that dozens of times. It's something internal to the audio subsystem itself where the data just goes missing - even the software level meter in the volume control applet never registers data flowing through once it dies. Definitely something in the audio software arena.)

@ Tihiy

Hairs — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:09:49 GMT

No, it's because in Vista MS decided that audio processing would become "virtualised", or a software stack.

Therefore all the performance advantages that having audio hardware give you will be not only neutered but rendered immaterial by the infinite opportunities of software devs to junk the whole thing up.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

SamCPP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:41:41 GMT

It is an interesting problem Steven. I've always wondered why the sound devices don't operate asynchronously and have playback buffers? Sort of like the cache on a DVD burner for example? Then all you would need is an API for adding to the buffer, stopping or pausing a "stream" and so on. Then your dedicated sound hardware would totally avoid any glitching as long as the computer didn't starve the cache.

@Xepol

cym104 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:04:48 GMT

try restarting "windows audio" service

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Rayadoman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:24:03 GMT

I have experience two glitch with audio on my laptop. Both times the computer comes out of sleep mode and the audio is completely dead. Sure the window audio bar shows sound is coming out but no sound is coming out of the speakers. I had this happen once on Vista and once on Win 7 RC. There was an 8 month gap between the glitches.

Solution: shut down, wait 1 minute, restart.

Just restarting will not fix the problem. The first time this happened, after restarting a few times with no luck (before I realized I had to power down completely), I reinstall the audio drivers with no luck. Quite annonying.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Xeonz — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:35:41 GMT

No, it's because in Vista MS decided that audio processing would become "virtualised", or a software stack.

exactly.. well done MS. NOT

but that bit that really peaves me.. not only did they junk things up.. there hasn't been ANY benefit to show for it at all.. other than numerous bad side effects.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

anonymuos — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:07:50 GMT

It happens more on my laptop I've clearly observed if I set the default format to 24-bit, 192 kHz (and I know my audio hardware suports that).

Also, one audio feature I would have liked to see is the re-mapping of DirectSound3D calls to XAudio 2 at the OS level like how Creative's Alchemy solution does. Or maybe a software only implementation of DS3D. That would have brought back all the surround sound fun in existing games on Windows 7. That and playing to multiple audio endpoints at the same time, so I don't have to constantly change the default device and can use the Play To fuctionality to play to more than one device.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Xepol — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:01:02 GMT

@cym104 -> I've tried that to no effect. I suspect the problem is more complex then restarting a single service that makes up part of the whole chain.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

CasualReader — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:16:50 GMT

"No, it's because in Vista MS decided that audio processing would become "virtualised", or a software stack.

Yes. It's been a problem of their own making, and what a stupid design decision that was.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

teoh.hanhui — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:57:34 GMT

@Xeonz: Allowing control of individual applications' sound levels is not a benefit?

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

GRiNSER — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:09:23 GMT

Media Player still has this annoying "I have deactivated all your plugins" inside so you have to manually reactivate all of them...

No nice transition between Playback and Library mode or fullscreen mode - anyone seen the fades on OS X? Much more smoother and appropriate for Media Playback if you ask me!

Playback engine in Media Player is still the same - if you have enabled fades between songs, playback of only one song in repeat results into weird glitches at the end of the song (song fades to next = same song but then cuts and plays the song from beginning)... Additionally, if one app uses up all the CPU (like Adobe Premiere CS4 in 7 when clicking through menus), the audio playback stops... Mostly that's a problem with the app but still this should be prevented by the OS.

To Xepol

linker — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:35:53 GMT

Xepol, I have the same problem under Windows 7. I'm using Creative X-Fi Music with the latest (still Beta) drivers for Windows 7.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

LarryOsterman — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:36:29 GMT

For those that are complaining about moving the audio stack from the kernel to user mode.

First off, the old stack glitched MUCH more frequently than the new one does. It was trivial to get the entire audio stack to lock up hard. In Vista and beyond it's many orders of magnitude harder to get glitches.

Secondly the primary reason for moving the stack from kernel mode to user mode was for reliability. By moving the audio stack from kernel mode to user mode, we were able to dramatically reduce the number of OS crashes.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

frandom — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:50:09 GMT

It's a shame you can't publish the details of which models are worst for glitches, I'd be interested to know if my Dell XPS M1730 has been noticed for its high amount of glitches during your testing. I know numerous other owners of it have glitching issues which are difficult to completely get rid of, and Dell haven't been a lot of help.

re: audio layers

rochlin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:06:21 GMT

My own experience w. the Win 7 RC audio:

No problems except with Media Player.

Regardless of settings, media player simply cannot play streaming audio without glitches.

The exact same streams (e.g. public radio stations - which are pretty high quality) play glitch free with default settings in WinAmp and iTunes.

It's a shame for the Windows engineering team to create such a high quality subsystem only to be subverted by a decorative, but non-functional top layer.

@ LarryO

Hairs — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:57:28 GMT

While swapping from kernel to user mode process may have solved one set of issues and made for a more stable subsystem in some respects, that doesn't negate the fact that an entirely new set of issues was created, audio performance suffered, and hardware that people had used for years (and had no need to be obsoleted) was rendered either broken or glitchy (whether it had glitched previously without being noticed by the user is of no interest to the user, after all) - and more important, that those issues were not addressed.

That may well be the fault of 3rd party devs - but that reinforces my point that the change only increased the ability of more people to junk up the audio systems. After the vista launch, major pieces of mainstream hardware that people had used for years, suddenly didn't work, and many still didn't work over a year later. A system that doesn't crash as often is of no benefit to a user who can't play audio, is it?

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Xeonz — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:23:04 GMT

just publish my posts will your MS.. I dare ya.... or or this a fail blog?? ..where anyone who's opinions seriously scrutinizes what you've done or lack of ...doesn't count.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

steven_sinofsky — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:48:25 GMT

@Xeonz - your post was filled with expletives.

Moving the stack

Hairs — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:25:28 GMT

The other point of course is that moving glitchy software from kernel to user mode may be one way of getting rid of crashes, but a more *effective* way would be to make sure that the code was up to quality and didn't glitch in the first place. "hey look, it's still broken but at least it's not crashing the system" isn't what I would call a quality goal.

Not to be negative!

Hairs — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:28:14 GMT

If there's one thing the blog has shown is that the Win7 team have put a lot of effort and thought into addressing base code quality, and it's the one thing that I take away from this blog as a great sign for the future from MS.

The other thing is that issues like this point to just how much code is still waiting to be fixed. Good luck with the next version of Windows, we do appreciate it even if we moan.

PS: Vista's explorer sucks. Really really badly. Please get rid of it. It sucks. XP's was much better.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

TAC4U — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:01:40 GMT

@Xeonz - Everything you list as a negative I see as a positive. Win7's search is incredibly useful, the crumb-bar saves a huge amount of time navigating, the "oversized" status bar is better for multi-tasking and distinguishing between icons, etc. And the audio changes were made to improve reliability and done back in the days of Vista. Is it really Microsoft's fault that the main third party soundcard manufacturer - Creative - has such shocking driver support? All it's really done was to expose Creative for the terrible company they are.

Win7 has improved performance and reponsiveness around the board, and quite dramatically. It's a great update in my eyes. It's clear you're not interested in the facts and just want to troll, as evidenced by your foul language and abrasive attitude.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

Jalf — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:22:41 GMT

@TAC4U: He's not saying that search is a bad thing, but that the implementation of it is not good enough. I'm not impressed by win7's search either, and to be honest, preferred the one in XP. Yes, it was primitive, it wasn't integrated into explorer and it was slow, but it found my files, guaranteed, all the time. For some reason, it seems a lot harder to coax Win7's search into doing an actual complete search of *all* files (or all files within a given folder).

The crumb-bar is fine, but the removal of the 'up' button is not, nor is the removal of all useful information from the statusbar at the bottom of an explorer window, or the way the folder hierarchy in the left pane no longer follows the active folder. As a whole, I have to agree with him, Explorer has been on a downhill slide since XP. Vista removed a lot of functionality from it, and 7 only continues that path, unfortunately. That wouldn't be so bad if it could be replaced (there are some really nice third-party alternatives out there), but it is such a core component of Windows that it can't really be swapped out.

Win7's Explorer is one of the major productivity killers for me.

I agree with you, Win7 is nice on the whole, and a definite improvement over Vista, but that doesn't excuse the few major blunders in it, or the ones it inherited unchanged from Vista.

@Hairs

Jaquez — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:38:08 GMT

"A system that doesn't crash as often is of no benefit to a user who can't play audio, is it?"

Are you kidding me? Turn that sentence around and see if that really says what you meant it to:

"The audio subsystem is now rock solid but your system will crash a lot more. But hey, at least it's not the audio's fault."

If the system crashes, it doesn't matter what the audio is doing and I would much rather my audio (very nice to have working, but rarely an essential subsystem) crash by itself than blue screen my entire system and lose everything.

I think Larry Osterman was simply responding to the "change with no benefit" comment and I would have to say, a more stable system is the single most important benefit I can imagine.

Well, maybe that and being able to mute a locked system ;-) Thanks, Larry!

@Jalf

Jaquez — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:47:29 GMT

What do you mean no 'up' button? You have a bunch of them now and most of them are faster than doing it the old way.

Each folder name in the crumb-bar IS an 'up' button now. If you want to go up by five levels, it's still only 1 click--on the folder you want to go to, not 5 clicks on a (now unnecessary) 'up' button.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

someone — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:01:23 GMT

Another pet peeve of mine is the Desktop isn't shown in the breadcrumbs bar as the uppermost level which contains (My) Computer. You must click the tiny downwards arrow to access the desktop from the breadcrumbs because most of the times the Favorites group isn't visible in Windows 7 unlike Vista if you've navigated to a long path and the scrollbar is all the way down in the navigation pane. Also, if there is a button to toggle the preview pane in Windows 7, why not 1 more button to toggle the navigation pane like the XP 'Folders' button? I kinda agree Explorer has been on a complete downhill slide since Vista and Microsoft is merely turning a deaf ear to our issues.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

steven_sinofsky — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:25:51 GMT

@Xeonz -- your use of language is not consistent with the dialog on this forum.

re: @various

marypcb — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:56:19 GMT

@Jalf

Are you sure you;re using Win 7 and RC? Didn't the Up/Back button make a 'by popular demand' return?

@Hairs

you do understand that much of the code that causes problems is the third-party driver code that Ms doesn't write? Creative and HP and the rest need to raise their game, but they don't always see the value in updating drivers for existing hardware for new OS releases when they make more money by selling new hardware.

I want to see Microsoft create an open and unbiased system for naming and shaming vendors who create buggy drivers that are so poor they negate the value of installing a whole service pack, vendors whose software slows down my system or decreases my battery life and vendors who consistently don't provide new drivers. I know it would make Ms unpopular with vendors and it would have to be completely accurate and legally vetted, but it would have huge user benefit. Ms already knows exactly which drivers crash most often and applies behind the scenes pressure, but I'd like to know when I choose a new graphics card if I'm picking one from a company that's often responsibly for buggy drivers, slow updates or power hog products. And if an AV product requires a ridiculous number of reboots to install an update (which I often see critiqued as the fault of Windows in Win v Mac comparisons) and then proceeds to eat 20%+ of CPU, I want Ms to be saying that this isn't acceptable.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

CobraA1 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:10:09 GMT

@marypcb:

No, sorry, they didn't put back in the up button.

Instead, they made the breadcrumb bar much more aggressive at keeping the parent folder available to navigate to.

I still prefer an up button, but I guess it's a compromise I can live with.

The "back is sometimes up" excuse is frankly a copout (it almost never is).

Frankly, I want to go up far more often than I want to go back.

This argument all goes back to how we deal with file management. There are two lines of thinking: "spatial" file management (using multiple windows) and "navigational" file management (a single window with a tree view on left) There's been arguments about what's the "right" way for a long time, and it's unlikely to be resolved soon.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/03/13/a-few-more-changes-from-beta-to-rc.aspx

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

TAC4U — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:30:56 GMT

"I'm not impressed by win7's search either, and to be honest, preferred the one in XP. Yes, it was primitive, it wasn't integrated into explorer and it was slow, but it found my files, guaranteed, all the time."

That's a joke, right? Not only was XP's search functionality appallingly slow but it wouldn't find the file I was looking for 90% of the time - and that's without even taking into account the stupid cartoon dog. With Vista and Win7 the exact opposite is true, as it's very accurate and incredibly fast. And the search functionality in the Start Menu allows me to launch apps in a fraction of the time, as I can't just press Win and type in 'calc' to get Calculator. It's an immense time saver. I'm quite surprised to hear someone complaining about the search functionality in Vista/Win7.

As for the "Up" button debate... the breadcrumb supersedes it. You can move about with much greater precision and you still have the Back button when using conventional navigation (unless you're typing in addresses manually it will always take you to the next folder up). Don't resist the change, embrace it. I don't even think about it anymore, as I'm so used to Vista.

The search functionality

thoeg — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:58:23 GMT

Strange how the threads here get off topic.

The search function in win 7, seems to be fast, so why complain?

Since there are no keyboard shortcuts to open aall programs, you need to use windows and land in the search field. For experienced users who knows what to search for, but is not good at shortcut keys searching for part of a program name makes sense. But for people who are used to navigating the start menu by first letter navigation and only using the keyboard you land too often in the search field. Another problem is the start menu at least all programs is now a treeview rather tthan the xp list with sub menues. At least for blind users this will sometimes give strange results or unexpected results.

I would like a keyboard shortcut to the search field or another shortcut to all programs, this would solve these problems, and maybe stop all of us that want to have the old xp start menu back.

The search is fast, but if it also searches in mails,it can report too many ansers. I have not really searched for files, but hopefully this is more accurate and faster than in XP. The last good search tool from MS was in windows98, but there may be search settings where I can customize the search behavior.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

sevenflavor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:18:18 GMT

Microsoft needs to separate real-time search including real-time content search and indexed search. The last real-time search which was fast compared to Windows Search 4.x was in Windows 2000/XP's Classic search. If the item is already indexed, then Windows Search 4.x is much more quicker at returning results. For near instantaneous real-time search, I now use Agent Ransack.

hmmm

Hairs — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:54:38 GMT

@marypcb

Blaming the vendors for not reacting to the change may be a valid point, but it doesn't solve the *user's* issues, does it? And most important, MS decided to make the change to "pretend fix" kernel crashes - the code still glitches and crashes, it just doesn't have the same fallout when it does. Rule 1: Don't break the way something works if your new way of doing it is ALSO broken. MS created the WHQL to avoid dodgy vendors creating bad drivers. By letting creative and nvidia drag on with dodgy, buggy drivers for over a year past Vista's launch, they damaged consumer opinion, and most important wasted users time. It also creates the cynical impression that new versions of Windows since 2000 are created to increase hardware sales for the benefit of OEMs and vendors, rather than to provide new useful functionality and improvement.

@Jaquez

My sentences say exactly what they mean. The only people who have no interest in running audio on their PC are corporate users who should run an image that has sound hardware disabled. To the average user, telling them, "Hey guess what your PC won't crash so much now, and that's all thanks to our brilliant new system of 'not letting you use the hardware!' Round of applause, guys!" is... err.. unhelpful?

For the record, my audio hardware does not work under Win7. Ask me how many times I've had a system crash due to audio stack problems. Ehhh.. None. Guess which OS I will consider "broken" when faced with a choice.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

commongenius — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:39:06 GMT

@Hairs

Your argument is clearly driven out of frustration rather than reason. If the audio system crashes, I can gracefully shut down my open applications, saving data as I go, and then restart the system when it is convenient for me (maybe after I have finished reading the important email my boss just sent me or after that big file finishes downloading). If the OS crashes, all applications just die, any tasks in progress are interrupted, state is corrupted and data is lost. Neither situation is desirable, but the former is clearly FAR better than the latter.

And blaming Microsoft for buggy drivers written by third party sound providers makes it clear that you are only interested in hating Microsoft, not on honestly evaluating the situation. Microsoft makes the operating system, but they don't make the audio hardware, and they don't make the interface for the audio hardware. If you buy a sound system from Creative, it is Creative's responsibility to support it. If they don't, it's their fault, not Microsoft's. As the OS vendor, it is Microsoft's responsibility to make sure that the OS remains stable even if the audio system crashes, which is what they did by taking it out of the kernel.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

porum — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:39:48 GMT

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

screwballl — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:46:54 GMT

I have found that the Vista subcoding sound API has caused a LOT more "glitching" than any previous of Windows. Even on the exact same computer (GA-EP35-DS3P, E6600, 4GB DDR2-800, 9800GT video) with multiple partitions (with XP SP3, Vista x64 SP2, Windows 7 RC v7100, Ubuntu 9.04), I have found that using this Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card works very well in all of the OS I have, except for Vista. I have seen and experienced sound glitches in Vista since the day I started beta testing it (when it was still called Longhorn). I have even removed this sound card and used the onboard sound which only made things much worse in Vista (and did not even work properly in Windows7).

So I really believe that removing the direct access to hardware I/O and switching it to a software based API has only made things worse. Increasing the work that the memory, chipset and CPU has to do means less direct I/O abilities and allowance for the hardware devices to do what they are meant to do, handle the code discreetly and directly without the need to direct everything (via software) through the CPU and everything else first.

With XP, everything worked and worked very well without stutters or glitches

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

e1e0n — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:18:06 GMT

I have very serious audio stuttering when running Media Center (Im using Windows 7 RC). Sound becomes very distorted, very unpleasant.

I have older computer(ASUS mb P4C800 Delux and Intel CPU at 3.0Ghz), but I think this computer is good enough for HTPC setup. I am testing Windows 7 to see if I should upgrade to it and have this kind of stupid problem in the only application I am going to use... However, when I watch the same movie using Media Player - the sound is perfect. Any suggestions?

Leo

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

tommyinoz — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:49:30 GMT

That's funny because my Amiga from the 80's could run a 32bit preemptive multitasking system on a 7.14Mhz CPU and could play complex wave form audio in stereo without glitching while the CPU is running at 100% doing spreadsheet calculations.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

e1e0n — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:29:10 GMT

Why would anyone wanted to get rid of hardware support? Why MS doesn't keep option to let sound be processed at HW level? This is kind of very unprofessional design. Why do I need to have software sound stack if I only going to use Media Center. The point using mixing sound for every applicaion separately is useless in that case.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

zandrarogers — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:49:51 GMT

I have seen and experienced sound glitches in Vista since the day I started beta testing it (when it was still called Longhorn). I have even removed this sound card and used the onboard sound which only made things much worse in Vista (and did not even work properly in Windows7).

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

maxpower — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:41:30 GMT

My main issue is with the latency caused in sound card line in monitoring.

For example, one was able to plug in a guitar into the line in and play and hear it realtime. And XP is in general a stable piece of OS. It hardly ever gives problems.

But in 7, it has so much latency. There has to be layers of useless stuff going on if, I can't plug in a source and play it unprocessed without latency. This renders my machine useless. The prospect of going to XP is not very good either, since Windows 7 excels in almost all other aspects.

For home recording studio owners, this is a big issue. There's always new gadgets but at the end of the day, one can plug in their guitar and record stuff at 1am for saving the idea. Real recording can be done later. I'm hesitant to move to recording interfaces since those might have the exact same issue due to the Windows 7 processing everything....

As a windows user, I'd much rather have a real responsive system with glitches than one that tries to guess my needs. If a person is playing a file and trying to compile a 200 file C++ program and they hear glitches, then stop doing resource intensive stuff. I know how to stop glitches in that situation. But I don't know how to _make_ windows guess my priorities correctly.

Is there a way to enable realtime monitoring bypassing the glitch resilient stack?

Lastly, Windows 7 is a more stable and faster OS than XP. It has many positives, so not Windowsh 7-bashing here. Just pointing out an issue with my home studio which may require a rollback.

re: Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

torcek — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:46:53 GMT

Nearly all developers from the professional audio market I know deprecate the way Microsoft handled the issue.

Moving everything out of the Kernel introduces such a big latency that no one can use software monitoring anymore. Yes, you have less glitches but a system that is unusable for creating and producing music with it.

If you follow the strategies of pro soundcard manufacturers you will find out that everyone will work around the windows audio system to keep the users happy.

So at the end of the day, all developers have more work through this.

best

torcek