> Other things to watch for...
You forgot:
o Try disabling any "motherboard / system monitor applications" - you know,
the kind that come with recent computers that check that your CPU isn't over
temperature, your CPU fans are still working at 5000RPM, etc...
o Try a different VIDEO card or try using different video card drivers...
amazing but true, video card manufacturers try to 'squeeze' extra
performance (i.e. Benchmark points :( ) out of their video hardware with a
technique known as "PCI Stalling". Essentially this means the PCI bus is
swamped with data sent from your video drivers to your video card. The
reason this is bad for AUDIO is that the drivers do not 'know' how much data
can be handled and so literally push as much stuff onto the PCI bus as it
can, until the various fifo buffers (in the motherboard chipset and on the
graphics card) literally fill up! This state (this is the PCI Stall) causes
the video card to process the data at its maximal rate because no other
'extraneous' traffic is on the PCI bus - that means during the PCI stall, no
sound data can travel between your sound drivers and your sound card! - and
hence the glitches can occur.
This last point is a curious one because it really really is bad practice
for the video card manufacturers to do this, yet several quite high-profile
companies are STILL using this terrible technique (was very popular until a
few years ago). And don't think you're necessarily safe just because you
have an AGP video card and/or an ISA sound card... the PCI stall technique
apparently also works with AGP video cards ... :( and a PCI Stall will on
most motherboards also cause the ISA bus to stall :(
Most video card drivers now have a setting (it might be hidden, check the
manuf's websites and newsgroups) that can be used to disable the Stall,
sometimes 'disguised' as "enable / disable bus mastering" ...
WinAmp tech support used to be littered with sound glitch complaints, many
of which could usually be tracked down to video driver problems. In fact
nullsoft used to have a videocard FAQ, something like
http://www.winamp.com/support/docs/vgakills.txt
try searching for "vgakills.txt" ? Enjoy ...
D
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