Optimizing Windows 7 Audio

foobar 2000 under win 10, better sounding than win 7 in my systems. Been years since I tried others but VLC was decent just a bit on the warmish side for me. Both FREE.

 

Anyone else experiencing Win10 probs with Gen5 USB or others? Using Foobar2000 / WASAPI event like always. Last month or so I've started getting random 1-2 second dropouts few times every hour. Latencymon is green, tried upgrading all drivers with sdi-tool, different Schiit drivers, disabled HPET from bios, different USB ports etc. Put back my old Furman conditioner, no help. Also tried another Win10 laptop, same friggin dropouts. I can see Foobar2000 cursor nudging back when it hangs, so it's like it can't send data forward.

First I suspected my Gen5 board is faulty, but I grabbed a second laptop with Win7 and I've been playing an hour without drops.. so it seems perhaps some recent Win10 update is shit for audio. Googling seems to find lots of dropout problems..

 

No drops for me on windows 10. Drivers recognized immediately.

Did you change your buffer length settings in foobar?

 

Of course, tried even all sorts of values for both wasapi event and push in advenced settings... I don't think that's the prob..

I really hope I hear a dropout on this Win7 machine... I'd rather send the board for replacement than downgrade my main PC to WIn7.. but perhaps Win8.1 would be acceptable.

edit: Seems my Win10 is still 1703 version.. I'll try upgrading to 1709..
edit2: Forgot to also set Advanced / Full file buffering in my new fb2k install.. let's see if it helps.. maybe streaming from NAS creates hiccups

 

@Hekeli

Not using Schiit drivers but have some feedback that may or may not help. I hate it when things get effed up like what you are experiencing.

I can experience a hiccup from shared drive over Ethernet only if I start a playlist for example then pause it and start it again after a few minutes. It seems to play the file from memory but then has to get new data to fill the buffers and sometimes the drive goes into a bit of sleep mode. After that 1-4 second silence all is fine and it continues to play without issues.

What setting are you using for Advanced Full file buffering out of curiosity? I keep mine at 0kb and everything works nicely.

 

1GB just to make sure some mixtapes etc are fully loaded.. makes nice for fast skipping if needed I've used the setting for ages, but installed Win10 few months ago and forgot.. funny that the probs only started recently. Might well be some strange Win10 and Samba versions acting together or just full moon affecting the ethernet... funny that the ancient Win7 laptop streaming with bad wifi worked fine.

Upgrading win 1709, but it requires decrypting Veracrypt first... groan..