Windows 7 to Make Your Ears Happy
According to Microsoft, a high number of PC users experience audio clicks and pops when listening to music or watching a movie. Microsoft calls these audio anomalies "glitches."
According to Microsoft, a high number of PC users experience audio clicks and pops when listening to music or watching a movie. Microsoft calls these audio anomalies "glitches."
Microsoft's Windows 7 blog team wrote:
Audio is especially sensitive. In order for you to hear music from your speakers, data needs to be delivered to your audio hardware approximately every 10 milliseconds, or 30 times in the blink of an eye! The challenge is that your PC is usually doing a lot of other things at the same time you’re listening to music, such as streaming that YouTube video or downloading that new song, and many of these other tasks have complex timing requirements as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much – a slow network driver or a graphics driver that requires plenty of CPU time – to prevent your audio from reaching your ears in a continuous fashion.
Microsoft's Windows 7 blog team says that with the final release of Windows 7, users will experience better audio quality across the board Microsoft's research team is working with several major PC vendors to get down to the root of audio glitch problem but the company indicated that more than 4.3-percent of people had 10 or more glitches during each computing session.
Users alone weren't the only indicating factor for this study. Microsoft showed that laptop users experienced more glitching than desktop users. In fact, the number of laptop users experiencing glitches doubles that of desktop users.
More interesting is the fact that certain brands of computer makers showed my glitched units than others. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not reveal the names of the manufacturers that it studied.
Microsoft is doing a lot of things to improve the user experience of Windows. From revamping the taksbar to tweaking sound performance, Windows 7 final is shapping up to be a good update to Windows Vista.
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Who listens to music and streams video at the same time?!?
PS who proof read this? a chimp?
If you are a serious audio freak it's best to bypass the whole Windows audio system and send the audio directly from your player to the soundcard. This can be done by disabeling the mixer for your soundcard in the Device Manager. Note that the volume control won't be working, you need to adjust the volume on your amplifier.
Seriously - which tard bothered counting 500+ glitches in a session - if it was that bad I would have fixed it rather than sitting on my ass tallying up how annoying it was.
Windows 7 release candidate collects telemetry data (with permission) that allows MS to view certain stats relating to how windows 7 is performing, people are not sitting there and counting glitches.
see http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/
I have never had this problem but meh
No offence - I do hope that "7" will be as good as XP (doubtful but still)... I just wanted to add that in most cases when the "glitch" occurs it's probably your OS hanging, timing out or simply crashing...
Usually don't have any glitches and if I do I know it's either the HDD or the network... In whole seriousness though - PC architecture (that is now what 20 years old?) is simply too old and not properly thought trough - I bet if someone could build a decent computer and deal with Microsoft to write an OS on it - we could finally get rid of all the skeletons sitting in the closet that come with the x86 architecture... ISA's, (still addressable and reserved memory space), BIOS (replaced by that new thing - but still a replacement), SATA (but the it can work as IDE - just in case?), limited IRQs (well replaced by APIC but still there are differences between implementations), Why cannot Intel sit down with Microsoft and design a NEW architecture that would be built from grounds up to support new devices ONLY, PB drives, and would do so in a stable and efficient manner? Remember Amigas? They had a special chip for every silly task but that allowed users to play music, format a floppy, copy files across 2 HDDs, display animations on the screen and let's say convert pictures on the another SCSI drive... All thanks to the architecture that did not produce more than 50-60MIPS back in the day BUT was designed to support all the elements working at the same time - we are heading the same way these days though - we have a CPU, GPU, DSP, MemoryController built into the CPU and... ? Architecture that did not even imagine 10% of all that... PCs needs a redesign - something along the lines of AMD's thinking, Intel's budgeting, MS' software (to kickoff the whole thing) and users to believe in it... Obviously it will never happen because intel would have to CHANGE their CPUs, MS would need to write proper OS and AMD cannot afford it... There is real life for you then...
A revamped task bar. That is really vital. Really.
I had a persistent audio glitch problem on an XP machine. It was not merely intermittent, it sounded like an old vinyl record. Re-installing XP cured it. I was unable to track down the cause, though it must have been some software previously installed on the PC. Some remnant of game copy protection was my guess, although I had no proof of that one way or the other. During troubleshooting I came across an MS tool called RATT, which logs statistics about interrupts, one of the things that might tie up the PC and cause glitchy audio. As far as I recall the heaviest interrupt activity was network related. For this reason Vista actually prioritises audio (or did so in the past, I'm not up-to-date on Vista) ahead of network activity, see http://blogs.technet.com/markrussi [...] 3290.aspx. Another interesting thing was - I'm not entirely sure which of MS operating systems this applies to, but I think it's true for at least some of them - that interrupts are only serviced by Core zero on a multi-core platform. Therefore, with so many multi-core CPUs sold in recent years, they might perhaps improve audio by moving it's processing onto another Core...
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussi [...] 33290.aspx
If you are listening to compressed MP3 audio via your laptop, then the odd glitch is the least of the audio worry.
I've just started down the dark dark audiophile path with a set of £90 headphones. I already want to upgrade the HomeCin basic kit I bought last year. It's a dark dark path and one that I didn't care about much. oh bugger!
How about if Windows came with a built-in file copy handler with support for queuing and pause/resume and speed throttling. I can't believe that I still need to download a seperate utility for that!