Jittering Songs...!?

Community TechTalk
1

Hello,

I’m going crazy! My life, my soul, MY MUSIC has gone mad! It’s all worked fine for the past X number of years / months / weeks, but suddenly all music jitters and jumps!

I thought this was a problem with Winamp, but noticed it’s the same through streaming audio / video online.

I had a discussion with someone at the Winamp forums about it, but everything I tried didn’t work - http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=219397

Please please does anyone have any suggestions of what might have happened!?

Thank you in advance!

Oli

2

are your soundcard drivers up to date?

3

Yeah, all up to date.

I just can’t understand what’s going on. Everything used to be fine, and all just went weird. I don’t even think I installed anything to make it do it.

I’ve defragged all my drives, fully, and still no change. I’ve also disabled NOD32 to realtime scan my mp3 filese, and the Winamp directory (just incase). I also just turned off NOD32 completely, but still jittered.

4

Quite odd, does playing them in windows media or an alternative player also skip? Do typical wav files, or a wma file skip as well,or just mp3’s?

5

Just tried mp3’s and wma’s in both Winamp and Media Player, but still the same.

I watched Task Manager while they were playing, and it says the CPU Usage is about 20%.

Would you know if any processes etc could be causing this, if I attached a Hijackthis log? (please see attached)

It’s all a bit confusing :frowning:

hijackthis.zip (2.03 KB)

6

I think I’ve got a severe problem with the access times on my second drive (the drive which my songs / videos are kept).

I’ve done a couple of speed checks against my other drive / partitions, and put them into a spreadsheet (please see attached). The ones highlighted in red is the drive in question - WDC WD1600BB-00DWA0 (Western Digital)

Anyone have any suggestions please?

Please note that on the first table in the spreadsheet (testing Hard Drive 0 against Hard Drive 1), I didn’t let the test complete on Hard Drive 1, because of how slow it was accessing the partitions - it had accessed 5% of what the first test had done, in approx. the same amount of time

hdd.zip (2.95 KB)

7

i think you have found the issue, that is TERRIBLE!

Now for improving it, if it is not abad drive, is DMA enabled?

8

Erm, I’m not too sure to be honest. I’m not clued up on things like that, sorry.

Here’s a report of my PC, if that’s any help at all…

I really appreciate the help!

Thank you!

Report.zip (45.4 KB)

9

Try running ActiveSMART or another SMART utility. Possibly the harddisk is reporting errors..

10

I’ve just run ActiveSMART, and it’s not reporting any errors :frowning:

Could there possibly be a driver that needs to be downloaded? On device manager, it says they’re all fine.

11

I think I’ve found the problem fingers crossed…

I opened the case up, to make sure all the cables were connected securely, which they were. I then swapped the IDE cables so the 2 harddrives were on one, and the CD and DVD drive were on the other. While I had the case open, I saw some purchases I added to the case a while ago; 2 fans and 1 exhaust fan. Just to make sure, I unplugged these and ran the PC, followed by the disk checker…the hard drive ran at approx. 24,000…

ARGH! Was it all because of 3 fans!? Or was it because of the IDE setup!? I assume it was the fans, as I’ve always setup my PC’s with 1 harddrive and CD drive on 1 IDE, and another harddrive and DVD drive on another.

I would never have guessed fans would suck out that much power…

12

It could have been that the power was not enough for the drive at full power.

Or did you switch the IDE cables as well, I was not clear on that matter.

13

Yeah, I switched the IDE setup aswell, so not sure if it’s that or the removal of fans, that have sorted the problem out. When I get chance, I’ll have a closer look.