I'm brand new to this forum (although I have spent some time reading before registering) and DJing in general, but I hope some of you guys can help me out with a problem that is driving me nuts.
I have a notebook running Windows 7 Professional on a fresh install. All drivers are up to date, there's not much installed besides MediaMonkey, foobar2000, Winamp and Chrome. I want to run MediaMonkey for prelistening (internal notebook sound) while using foobar or Winamp for the actual playback via a Numark DJiO 2 USB interface.
First thing I noticed is that I would get playback dropouts/crackle whenever the computer was not plugged in and was running on battery. Plugging it in made things much better, so I figured the problem was some kind of energy saving settings. So I followed this procedure to make same adjustments to the power savings features:
https://support.serato.com/hc/en-us/art ... -Windows-8
While things have improved a little, playback is only running smoothly for a few minutes. After that, any user activity will introduce crackle / dropouts to the audio playback. This can be anything from opening a browser window to resizing a window or just scrolling through my list of songs in MediaMonkey. Needless to say, this is just not acceptable for a live situation.
A few observations I have made:
- although this can affect also the computer's internal sound, USB devices are affected much more by these dropouts. (Tested with the cheap Numark interface as well as a more pricey M-Audio USB interface.)
- DCP Latency Checker shows no problems during playback, never reaching the red latency values
- The CPU usage is constantly above 50% even when no programs are running, the most active process being Windows' svchost.exe. CPU usage peaks can easily reach 100% during said user activity.
- foobar's buffer length is set to 2010ms, increasing the buffer has had no noticeable effect.
Cheers,
Christoph