My Mp3's skip?

[jarviscares]

Hello... hopefully this is the right category to post this in. If not, my apologies.

So here's the problem. My Mp3's skip. Every one of them I have tried to play, in every audio player on my computer (winamp, wmp, creative jukebox). My drivers are up to date on my creative SB Live! 5.1 sound card, and i cannot for the life of me figure out the problem. Just every song I try to play will skip ahead a second, seemingly at random, a few times each song, which makes listening useless because it's so annoying. I might as well just have a cd player beside my computer.

If anyone has any helpful input or ideas I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks so much!

 

[KillyKillall]

Did they used to work? Did this just start one day?

 

[jarviscares]

yeah they used to work wonderfully... then they just stopped and havn't worked since.

 

[Slikkster]

well, something had to change. Have you changed any hardware recently?

A simple test you can do is to download the PCI Latency Tool, and lower your video card's latency setting. Read the instructions on the download page.

What can happen is many of today's graphics cards can hog the pci bus (i.e. have high latency values set), and it causes disruptions with other hardware that needs to use the bus. Yes, even though your card may be AGP, it's still affecting the PCI bus.

If you run the tool and see your graphics card has a latency of 248 or thereabouts, try setting it to 64 or 32, and see if it helps your sound issues.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951

 

[jarviscares]

well i don't have a high end video card by any means (GeForce 4 mx 420), but in either case nothing has a higher latency than 64, except for my PCI Ethernet 10/100 adaptor, which is at 128.

I havn't changed any hardware anytime around when this happened...

I'm beginning to think that maybe somehow all the encoding on my mp3's got messed up? Is this easily possible? Maybe I'll try ripping a cd to mp3 and see if they have the same problem... that may narrow it down to whether it's a hardware problem or not.

Thanks for all the ideas so far, if anyone else has some please feel free to contribute!

 

[Slikkster]

just download an mp3 from someone else's encoding and test that.

 

[RebateMonger]

Did you check your RAM for scratches?

 

[jarviscares]

*update*
I just freshly ripped a cd to my harddrive and it does the exact same thing (off mp3, not the cd).

CD's play fine.

I've just discovered that videos also seem to do the same thing...

I'm thinking it's time to just do some backing up and reformat. it's been awhile.

Anyway, any more suggestions would still be good, thanks so far.

 

[jarviscares]

 

[jarviscares]

check my RAM for scratches... didn't even think of that. Is there a way to test or do i just pull it out and look? that would explain the video too, and the slightly sluggish behavior as of late... thanks!

 

[Slikkster]

While it's probable that reinstalling Windows would solve the problem, that's kind of a "baby out with the bathwater" approach. But far be it for me to tell you how to proceed.

I'd just as soon figure out the problem, because chances are it may come up again at some point, and you don't want to be doing the reinstall thing every time.

So, now we know that your videos and mp3's skip. Does the video itself (not just the sound, but the video component) "skip" ahead?

What motherboard are you using?

Any chance you've got a codecs problem going on? Are you using Divx at all?

 

[jarviscares]

yeah i've yet to ever reformat since I've got this guy (almost... wow 3 years now? at least 2 anyway). I'd rather not. But we'll see what happens.

The video itself does skip, usually by a few seconds every half a minute or so (varies on the video though, from what I can tell the skipping is random).

As for the motherboard, I feel like a bit of a dope but I'm not sure. I have a Dell dimension 8200, and I know that it has 533 MHz frontside bus and an intel chipset (i think 850E)... I will try to find out more about it, I'm goin out for supper right now though.

Not using Divx, could be codecs, is there an easy way to find out?

Thanks so much!

 

[RebateMonger]

Is there something else running on your PC, consuming a lot of CPU cycles?
View "Task Manager" (ctrl-alt-del) and verify that your computer isn't being kept busy by some rogue task. When doing "nothing", you should normally see "System Idle Process" at nearly 99%. If you are down in the 70% range or something, or if something is cycling, that could cause problems with media players.

 

[Slikkster]

http://avicodec.duby.info/ That's a general codec installed list app.

There's the Sherlock Codec Detective that will point out "broken" codecs, too.

http://www.updatexp.com/sherlock-codec-detective.html

I've been thinking about this, though. A couple of other things come to mind.

I would open up Device Manager and take a look at your resources.

Device Manager -View- Resources by Connection - Interrupt Request

Chances are both your graphics card and SB Live are sharing an Interrupt with some other device(s). See what those are.

Also, check your hard drives in Device Manager. Look under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, and click on both the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel. Go to the Advanced Settings section. See if the "Transfer Mode" is set to "DMA if Available"., and what the current transfer mode is for both your hard disc(s) and opticals.

 

[jarviscares]

Well I found a temporary fix... I downloaded the VideoLan VLC Media player (freeware program) on the advice of a friend, then updated to the newest version of Winamp, and both those players now work fine with video and audio.

Programs like WMP, Quicktime and creative playcenter jukebox still have the same problem though, and though it is no longer pressing it would still be nice to figure out the problem. Slikkster when I get a minute I'll take a look at those links and your ideas, and get back to you with more information. Thanks to everyone for the help!

 

[jarviscares]

Slikkster -

I'm not too familiar with Interrupts, but by looking at it I assume that if it has the same number beside it, it is sharing an Interrupt. If this is the case, my SB card is on its own in 18, but my video card is sharing 16 with my Ethernet adapter.

for my Primary IDE Channel transfer mode is set to DMA if available, and the current mode for device 0 is PIO Mode and device 1 is Not Applicable.

my secondary IDE mode is also set to DMA if available, and both device 0 and 1 are set to "Ultra DMA Mode 2"

hopefully that's the information you need, if you need more just let me know.

*Edit*
I checked my codecs, and they all seemed fine...
and RebateMonger, my system idle process is up at 99% like it should be, it was one of the first things I checked on my own. Thanks for the suggestion though!

 

[Slikkster]

What device is on your Primary IDE Channel? Normally, that is used for the hard drive.

If your hard drive is running in PIO mode, that's a real problem, and will no doubt cause choking on heavy file input and output.

 

[oynaz]

Check for adware and spyware. These things can really hurt your performance.

 

[jarviscares]

I apologize for my limited computer literacy, but what's the easiest way to find out what device is on it? It didn't tell me anywhere in properties.

 

[Slikkster]

No need for apologies whatsoever. As with anything in life, one learns by doing. That's how I know anything about pc's. Just from doing.

Now, the easiest way to see what controller channel your hard drive is on is to look at the Dell 8200 "setup" screen (aka "bios").

Reboot, and before Windows starts, press F2. I'd start pressing it as soon as you see any black and white info on the screen.

Once you get into the Setup, the info you need is on the very first screen.

Look for Primary Drive 0
Primary Drive 1
Secondary Drive 0
Secondary Drive 1

Copy down the info, and report back with it.

Tap the ESC key to get out of Setup. If it asks, you want to "Exit without Saving".

 

[jarviscares]

Thanks!
So: Recap:
Primary and secondary are both set to DMA if available.
Primary device 0 is in PIO Mode and is my hard drive.
Primary device 1 is not applicable and is "off"
Secondary device 0 and 1 are both Ultra DMA Mode 2 and are both CD ROM readers.

 

[RebateMonger]

PIO is NOT what your hard drive should be set to. It should be DMA. Unless it's a 15-year-old, 100MB hard drive.
PIO will GREATLY limit your hard drive data transfer speed.

 

[Slikkster]

This is what I was getting at before. If your hard drive is in PIO mode (Programmed Input/Output), your drive relies on the computer's cpu to be involved in all file input and output. That puts a great load on your cpu, and can easily cause stuttering when heavy file input/output (like playing sound and/or video files) is occurring.

You want your hard drive to be in DMA mode, which is Direct Memory Access. This essentially keeps your pc's cpu out of the process, so it can concentrate on other things.

The issue now is to see why your drive is in PIO, vs. DMA.

What you need to do is "uninstall" the Primary IDE Channel in Device Manager and let Windows reinstall it upon reboot. Don't worry...it will do so automatically. The hope is that upon reinstall it will show up as UltraDMA vs. PIO in Device Manager.

Here's the steps:

Uninstall the Primary IDE Channel

To do that, open Device Manager as follows. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, right-click on Primary IDE Channel, click on Uninstall.

Reboot to make the changes active and permanent.

After booting Windows will automatically reinstall the IDE channel and the harddrive.

Go back to Device Manager after reboot. Make sure the Primary IDE Channel says "DMA if Available", and also that the Primary IDE Channel is running in UltraDMA mode.

If, for some reason, it doesn't say "DMA if Available", toggle that on, and close out and reboot again. Then see if the drive comes up in DMA mode.

Now, if you do all this and it still ends up running in PIO mode, we have other places to look for the problem. But this might be enough to turn it on for now.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: Slikkster
This is what I was getting at before. If your hard drive is in PIO mode (Programmed Input/Output), your drive relies on the computer's cpu to be involved in all file input and output. That puts a great load on your cpu, and can easily cause stuttering when heavy file input/output (like playing sound and/or video files) is occurring.

You want your hard drive to be in DMA mode, which is Direct Memory Access. This essentially keeps your pc's cpu out of the process, so it can concentrate on other things.

The issue now is to see why your drive is in PIO, vs. DMA.

What you need to do is "uninstall" the Primary IDE Channel in Device Manager and let Windows reinstall it upon reboot. Don't worry...it will do so automatically. The hope is that upon reinstall it will show up as UltraDMA vs. PIO in Device Manager.

Here's the steps:

Uninstall the Primary IDE Channel

To do that, open Device Manager as follows. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, right-click on Primary IDE Channel, click on Uninstall.

Reboot to make the changes active and permanent.

After booting Windows will automatically reinstall the IDE channel and the harddrive.

Go back to Device Manager after reboot. Make sure the Primary IDE Channel says "DMA if Available", and also that the Primary IDE Channel is running in UltraDMA mode.

If, for some reason, it doesn't say "DMA if Available", toggle that on, and close out and reboot again. Then see if the drive comes up in DMA mode.

Now, if you do all this and it still ends up running in PIO mode, we have other places to look for the problem. But this might be enough to turn it on for now.

Excellent advice! Hi Slik!

 

[jarviscares]

AHHH Thank you soo much! Worked like a charm... Had to restart twice, and it's now Ultra DMA Mode 5... and everything seems less sluggish (it wasn't too bad before, but there's a noticable difference) and now all my players work fine on music and even really large videos!

I appreciate all the help, I'll definately be back next time I need some help... or next time I'm bored .

Just out of curiosity, how would it have changed to PIO Mode? I know for sure I didn't change it, at least not knowingly... or is it possible it was just always in that mode?

Anyway, thanks again!