Channel 9 Forums - Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

ebudae2000 — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:35:45 GMT

I have just installed windows Vista Ultimate on my Acer TravelMate 5620 notebook. Everything is running great except for one thing, my cds won't play properly. Or rip correctly for that matter. I have tried ever many different ripping and media applications.

Ripping takes place at between 0.5x and 1.4x as opposed to the minimun of 16x I am used to.

Playing cds is a nightmare because the audio is constantly starting and stopping intermittenly. I can barely go five seconds without it stopping.

If you are going to reply to this post, it is not the hardware. Everything works perfectly fine on XP and this machine has more than enough power to handle Vista.

I have scowered the net and found nothing. Is there anyone who can assist?

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

Simon Jones — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:37:21 GMT

I've seen this before. I removed the manufacture's audio driver and let Vista use its own. Problem gone.

Simon Jones
Contributing Editor
PC Pro Magazine

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

cokert — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:35:30 GMT

Are you seeing high CPU usage while playing? If so, what processes are active?

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

ebudae2000 — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:54:13 GMT

Hi guys

I checked for a spike in CPU usage, but could notice none. Or rather if there was a spike it was not significant enough to be causing that kind of stuttering. Its weird. DVDs play absolutely fine. But cds just won't play.

Also, I uninstalled all my drivers for audio and the drive itself, but to no avail.

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

Steven J Ackerman — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:33:04 GMT

It's probably the Vista ME DRM system attempting to verify that you do own the media every 5 seconds...

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

cokert — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:21:53 GMT

can you play other audio (ie, wav mp3 etc) ok? if you can, i would guess that windows is trying to play the audio back digitally. ie, its trying to extract the audio digitally and play the result. like its ripping the cd and playing it at the same time. look for an option that sounds like play audio digitally. also, download winamp or something like it and try playing the cd/ripping the cd through winamp.

if its skipping on everything ... idunno. i asked about the cpu using wondering if it wasn't vista's drm. i saw a post right after vista was released about someone seeing a process with a nefarious name using 10% cpu while playing an mp3 though wmp, and that same process using 0% while playing through a different media player...

Tech Off - Stuttering audio playback in Vista

Sven Groot — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:45:43 GMT

cokert wrote:

if its skipping on everything ... idunno. i asked about the cpu using wondering if it wasn't vista's drm. i saw a post right after vista was released about someone seeing a process with a nefarious name using 10% cpu while playing an mp3 though wmp, and that same process using 0% while playing through a different media player...

The process you refer to is mfpmp.exe, which is responsible for rendering the audio (and despite the fact that this process is also responsible for the protected audio path, in this case DRM has nothing to do with it as the content is not protected). The other audio player you refer to is probably Foobar2000, which is capable of writing audio directly into the kernel mode audio driver, skipping the user mode layer and mfpmp.exe.

Mfpmp.exe's excessively high CPU usage seems to be caused by buggy drivers (at least I've read reports of people upgrading their drivers and the issue disappearing), and, I repeat, has nothing to do with DRM.

Since the OP is not seeing excessive CPU usage and from his wording it seems the problem is limited to audio CDs only, I'm guessing that's not his problem.