Need advice: Stuttering/Choppy sound when playing MP3 and accessing hard drive

[cdawg]

Can someone please offer any suggestions as to why disk access (or launching a new program) would cause stuttering and/or choppiness to occur during MP3 playback under 98se?

I have tried the following and am getting really frustrated confused;:

• 1. Installed latest WinAmp version and latest Windows Media Player
  Both have this stuttering problem. WinAmp freezes my system occasionally.

• 2. Bought PNY 256 MB PC133 from Staples for $43 with PM, $10 off and $20 rebate
  Thanks to the Hot Deals PNY Thread
  Now, I have a total of 384 megabytes and still stuttering. I used the System Monitor to track Unused Physical Memory and Swapfile in use, but this didn't give me any new information.

• 3. Increased Sound playback performance to FULL under Control Panel -> Multimedia -> Audio -> Advanced Properties
  Still, the same problem.

• 4. Changed the System properties -> Performance -> File Sytem -> Hard Drive : Settings - "Typical role of this computer" from "Desktop Server" to "Network Server"
  Still, the same problem.

• 5. Changed the System properties -> Performance -> File Sytem -> Hard Drive : Settings - "Read ahead optimization" to FULL
  Still, the same problem.

• 6. Ran "msconfig" to see if any Startup processes were causing this to occur
  I removed some miscellaneous processes and still, the same problem.

• 7. BIOS Settings
  Not too sure if any would help out, so I didn't mess around too much here.

• 8. Disk defragmenting
  I haven't done this yet as it will take quite a few hours to complete.

Here's a list of my hardware
P2/400
384 MB
Seagate ST 34573LW (4.3 GB) on SCSI - Adaptec 2940UW PCI
Western Digital (30 GB) on IDE <-- problem happened before I added this on
Diamond Sonic S100 sound card <-- crappy card?
Best Data TNT2 video card

Just for reference here a WinTune snapshot of my system:
CPU (1) Intel Pentium II with MMX@401 MHz
Video Board NVidia TNT2 M64
Video Mode 1024x768@32bits/pixel
RAM 384 MB
OS Windows 98 4.10.2222 A

Area Tested Value
CPU Integer 1162.741 MIPS
CPU Floating Point 460.3087 MFLOPS
Video(2D) 53.43543 MPixels/s
Direct3D 39.36422 MPixels/s <-- is this low or what?
OpenGL 32.3884 MPixels/s <-- is this low or what?
Memory 683.5572 MB/s
Cached Disk 77.65924 MB/s
Uncached Disk 3.986543 MB/s


Any help would be appreciated!

 

[NateSLC]

Is the sound card sharing an IRQ with the IDE controller? I had a similar problem once and solved it by moving the sound card to another PCI slot (IRQ). I also installed the latest IDE drivers..

Hope that helps,
Nate

 

[MikroMak]

Mine will &quot;skip&quot; to if I'm trying to read off a cdrom drive on the same IDE channel. I'm pretty sure Winamp streams the file off the HDD instead of loading the file into memory. IDE devices can only access soo much at once and certain things will automatically take priority over others. I'm running under Windows 2000 and changing the Priority in Task Manager seems to greatly reduce the problem. You can try this in Winamp but I don't know if it'll show up under 98 (no 98 boxes in this house . Press CTRL+P -> Options -> Process Priority Class
Trying setting this to High. If that doesn't test it try RealTime. However Winamp doesn't recommend either and I don't recommend RealTime as RealTime devotes about 90-100% of your processor to Winamp alone. That becomes a little bit of overkill.

 

[DAM]

mine did the exact same thing when i updated my winamp software, try going back to an older version. its a crappy way to solve it but it worked for me.



dam()

 

[cdawg]

Might not be related to the IDE, because I had this problem before I added the 30 GB IDE hard drive. Prior to that drive, I only had one 4.3 GB connected to the on-board SCSI controller.

I played around with the IRQs of the SCSI controller (IRQ 10), sound card (IRQ 11) and the display card (IRQ 11). I tried a few combinations. And still, the sound stutters. Arghhh...

Any other suggestions?

 

[IIIBradIII]

In Winamp preferences, just increase the read-ahead buffer size to something like 6 or 8 if you have enough RAM. That worked for me awhile back.