Vaio AW - sometimes jerky music playback

Hi,

I own a Sony Vaio AW31 S/B (P8700, 4GB, Full HD). Quite powerful machine, I'd say, but I wonder about one thing: When I'm listening to music (using Winamp 5.56) just along the way while doing other stuff on the computer, it happens sometimes that the music playback gets jerky for half a second or so.

It most likely happens when I'm editing pictures from my digital SLR with GIMP. OK, this may be a quite power-consuming task, but on the other hand, the Vaio should be powerful enough to handle music and picture software at one time, shouldn't it?

With my last notebook, i never noticed any jerking in the music playback, even though it was way not as well equipped as the Vaio. Or does the Full HD display with enabled color management need a lot of system power?

Anyone else encountering this kind of "problem"? OK, It's not very annoying, but still I'm wondering about it.

Cheers
Tobi

 

Increase the buffer size of your music playing software, or give it a higher priority.

 

Giving higher priority to Winamp? Increasing buffer to play ONE stereo track?
Sorry but this is rather frivolous advice. "My car is not starting", "Get a turbo"
He is talking about WINAMP not multitrack playback of Protools or Cubase. The issue is elsewhere. There should be no jerks while editing photo and playing 1 stereo track on Winamp even on 10 year old 500 Mhz or less CPU.
Something else is taking over for those moments, the biggest culprits- on post XP OSs- are
1.System restore
2.Indexing
They are must to disable for pro audio apps but I dont think you want to part with this functionality.
3. The biggest culprit is idiotic, useless Nvidia utility that checks at regular intervals if you connected external monitor. Disabling all Nvidia sh... in autostart might solve the problem, just that you will have to activate ext monitor manually when you connected to running pc.
Disabling indexing makes any search terribly slow but if you use Acronis or other backup systems maybe you can disable systemrestore

 

Modern computers run a lot more intensive tasks simultaneously than a 10 year old 500 MHz box. Increasing the buffer size does help for playback, when you have tasks that grab all resources for a short time (like the above mentioned nvidia utility, if that was what it did).

Also, a laptop of 2009 will generally have a slower hard drive than a half a decade old desktop computer. That becomes the bottleneck. Yes, things like the indexing will request access to the HD, and intermittently prevent other programs from getting access immediately. They will get it, they just have to wait for their turn in the queue for the slow HD. And again, increasing the buffer size helps -- the music program can survive for longer periods without getting more data from disc.

 

Of course it does but stuff like that you do with pro audio not bl...y Winamp, jerky playback of simple audio file is not normal and shouldnt be solved through means that are meant for multitrack, professional audio etc. Evan 500 mHz is too much. My f... Ericsson phone can do it, even previous model from 4 years back could do it. The chap has 4G RAM, P8600 CPU and get jerky audio playback of simple file!!!! this is ridiculous. And mentioning HDD speed is even more ridiculous in context of 1 track - 5400 can easily stream 64 tracks, 7200 to 128 or more. Even the mentioned disabling of indexing or system restore are not necessary, his system must be able to play several winamp, mediaplayers at the same time and do his photoediting at it.
There is something very basic that has to be fixed, it could be the Nvidia or some other lousy driver that needs update. The procedure would be to run DPC test, then locate the possible culprit . Otherwise try and error, disabling at least unused, likely trouble makers like Marvel (LAN if not used), some BT drivers etc. Checking for updates on Sony site, installing the newest is good idea too, specially the graphic card

 

Hi guys,

thank you for your feedback! Somehow, I agree with both of you: On the one hand, such a modern machine should be powerful enough to handle multiple tasks with ease. But on the other hand, the computer is loaded with so many background processes (Vista, all the Vaio stuff...), I don't wonder that interferences may occur in some special situations. GIMP also wasn't originally made for Windows, so it might not be the ideal program to run on a Windows Vista machine, plus, 5 opened 10 Megapixel files, the Full HD Display and enabled color management don't make the task easier for the computer.

So, as a workaround, I increased the buffers for the Direct Sound plugin in Winamp and downloaded the newest Realtek Audio drivers. So far, no more jerking, but of course, I didn't test a lot until now. i think I have to see in the daily routine, how it works now.

But don't misunderstand me, the playback was not jerky all the time, only every 2 minutes or so I had some crackling or jerking for like half a second or even less.

Cheers
Tobi