Pops and clicks using official ASIO in Windows 8 with foobar, but no p, Please add more priority options Options

[PelPix]

Microsoft seems to have written a new scheduler for handling tasks better in 8, and it works, but the priority settings now mean different things, and anything below the redesigned "Realtime" setting means it's handled in a way that is not suitable for audio playback on some ASIO drivers, so it pops at every latency. The easiest solution is to add ALL of the priority options to the ASIO component instead of just having a tickbox for "high priority."

This post has been edited by PelPix: Sep 22 2012, 06:12

[PelPix]

Windows 8 users, if you're experiencing pops, try the fix for yourself!
Open Task Manager and set the ASIO host's priority to real-time. Problem solved!

[fuflo]

are you using native asio drivers or asio4all? personally, with tascam us-144mkII i had/have no issues with asio at all ( native driver ) on win8.

[PelPix]

are you using native asio drivers or asio4all? personally, with tascam us-144mkII i had/have no issues with asio at all ( native driver ) on win8.

Native. Setting priority to "Realtime" universally fixes them, and has caused no instability in 10 continuous hours of use (so faR).

[neograniceni]

Would be really nice if such an option to set asio host priority to realtime would be implemented in some future release.

This post has been edited by neograniceni: Nov 15 2012, 21:45

[neograniceni]

Windows 8 users, if you're experiencing pops, try the fix for yourself!
Open Task Manager and set the ASIO host's priority to real-time. Problem solved!

Well, the problem is that foobar closes/reopens ASIO host every time you start to play song, or when the song is paused/stopped, and it's priority is reset to normal or high which is not enough to work without problems under Win8. So I made a little tray tool to detect and set/keep ASIOhost32.exe or ASIOhost64.exe priority to realtime. Will test it today, and if everything would work I'll share it here.

[neograniceni]

Well, here it is. It works OK for me using foobar 1.1.16, ASIO 2.1.2, Asus Xonar ST with Unixonar driver 1.64 and Windows 8 Pro x64. You can put this to your startup if you want. You can download it from here. Disclaimer: use it on your own responsibility.

Edit: just found there could be multiple asiohosts opened at the same time in foobar. e.g. if you open asio properties from settings while playing music through asio out, or vice versa. Only the first (oldest) asiohost process will be set to realtime priority. I have no intention to deal with that 'coz messing with the ASIO settings while playing music is not something we should be doing anyway. Hope foobar will get an option to set ASIO host realtime priority in some future release, so this tool would become unnecessary.

This post has been edited by neograniceni: Nov 16 2012, 18:29

[neograniceni]

BTW be sure to run it as an administrator (give admin privileges to the shortcut or .exe file) !

[neograniceni]

Version 1.1. update: no longer need to run as administrator, now runs through Windows UAC. Link is the same as above.