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Linux distro for FLAC music jukebox? Win7 annoying me

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DaveSimmons

Elite Member
I have an Acer mini-ITX PC for my music jukebox, with Foobar2000 as the player and 1,000+ CDs ripped to lossless FLAC.

This mostly works, but at least a couple of times a day the playback stutters from things like Windows or MS antivirus waking up and downloading updates. Annoying!

So, I'm looking for a lightweight OS with good FLAC playback software, where no rogue update processes are going to spoil the playback. Suggestions are welcome.

I'd also consider getting a new NUC to go with the new OS but not one with a whiny fan. It also needs ~500 GB of storage but SSD prices in that range are finally semi-reasonable.
 
Any distro really. I would stick with distros that have a long support cycle, such as Ubuntu LTS releases, Debian, etc.


I would use Arch Linux, but I understand that it is an acquired taste. 🙂
 
I think you can disable MSE and Windows Defender from doing there daily scans. If you go into the Control Panel the Action Center allows you to disable it. If that doesn't work you can disable MSE or Windows Defender by opening the program from the Control Panel and manually turning it off under Administrator Settings.

Could you be more specific about "least a couple of times a day the playback stutters from things like Windows". That's pretty vague.....Besides the anti virus scans what Windows background program is causing an issue?
 
I don't remember why, but I always had issues with WMP stuttering. Its been so long since I used my Windows machine to play any music files. I switched to the K-Lite Codec Pack with MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) and made MPC-HC default for everything, but I cant even remember if that helped. I haven't had any issues with MPC-HC playing video files. That's about all I can say about it now since that's all I use it for anymore.
 
bbhaag said:
Could you be more specific about "least a couple of times a day the playback stutters from things like Windows". That's pretty vague.....Besides the anti virus scans what Windows background program is causing an issue?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try that first.

What happens is that randomly, in mid-song, playback stalls for a split second then resumes. This is a different PC than the work PC (so the Windows event sounds don't drive me mad) so when it happens I need to switch the KVM switch to that PC and bring up task manager. At that point it looks like MS security is active.

At other times I've seen Windows doing background transfers of updates.

But my looking at Task Manager is after the playback stall is over so I can't be sure what spiked CPU or disk use and interfered with Foobar2000. Maybe it's something else like Adobe Flash phoning home.

It's a dual-core i3 so it should have enough power to run normal Windows background processes without problems.
 
Make sure Windows Update is not set to Automatic on that machine. Do Defender scans manually, not on a schedule. You could also use a process manager utility like Process Lasso to set foobar as a high-priority task. PL should also prevent any other tasks from interfering with foobar.

If you do go Linux, foobar runs well in Wine.
 
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