When I run foobar .7x (any .7 version) playback skips while it is backgrounded and I am playing games. Most notably right at the start of a race in Live for Speed, music pauses a good 3 - 5 seconds, then skips a couple more times and settles down and plays after that mostly, though will skip sometimes. At the start of Live for Speed my system CPU is at 100% though it does drop a bit after the first corner. Sitting on a menu screen or a configuration screen with graphics and sounds going in the background and 7.s work fine, goto an actual race with lots of CPU use, and it chokes.

Anyway, I have tried all the output modes (including kernal streaming) and they all do the same thing. Had the same problem through several complete fresh installs, with various modules on (or off, install normal, and sometimes remove modules I don't use including the DSP attenuator/volume)..

Other players work, foobar2000 0.667 works great..

I have one of the first nforce boards from Asus, the built in sound system sounds good and supports a lot of bitrates, but I get the same trouble no matter what I change. (Very easy to test using Live for Speed cause it always happens when I start the race, other games are much more erratic.) When I am not doing games .7 through .71beta6 all work and sound great.

I really like many of the new features of the .7s and would like to have it as my only player, but I can't give up my games! So 0.667..

Any ideas?
Lena

Alright you've probably tried this already, so sorry if I am not mutch help then. But are you sure "playback thread priority" is set to maximum and have you tried increasing the buffer length already. (both in preferences)

Don't play that many games either so I haven't encountered that problem yet myself.

You can also try disabling visualization processing.

Yes, done all that, anything I could think of, everything I have read of from a few weeks, months.. of lurking around the forums, including playing files of all different types, not just mp3s or something, but mpc, ape, most anything foobar will play.. Something changed that is making it pause/hesitate when playing back files under heavy load or maybe something about games? But it does it using wav/kernel/directsound/directsound2.0 outputs too and other players don't, including 0.667.

Kept thinking I would see someone else post about it, is it just me?

i don't have "playback thread priority" in my preferences

i do have the buffer size setting


i'm running Foobar 0.7 with a SB Live

i've also experienced choppy sound when playing directx games

it's not a big deal, but plaback priority was the first thing i looked for

Go:

Preferences -> Playback -> Playback thread priority
(look the right corner up in the window)



We all have try increase it

I'm surprised that it _didnt_ happen with .66x, It's completely understandable that a 3d game will take up 100% CPU during loading and cause a mediaplayer to skip. This computer skips music when I open Counter-Strike, and I dont have a problem with it, it occasionally skips during alot of animation as well, and it's a very nice system.

Other games do it to me too, but only with Live for Speed could I get it to hiccup reliably enough for testing. Load the game, switch to desktop and change foobar settings or change to a different players, then start a race and boom, big music pause right when the race starts followed by a few more then it settles down and plays though still does skip erratically. It doesn't happen like that except with .7s and any combination of settings and every kind of music file I tried.

I play some everquest too with the same results but it is harder to test because it happens erratically and less often. I expect things to mess up under heavy cpu use, but it only seems to happen with the new foobar and not other players.

At first I just thought it was the system load causing the music to skip, it seems so logical. It was only because of the way LFS skips so consistently that I began to suspect foobar and only after a couple hours of messing around with various settings did I suspect there might be a problem. I even dropped the CPU load by using weaker graphics in game, but it still skipped the same.

I can use .667 for when I play games, and .7 for everything else, I am not totally sure it isn't just me, some odd combination of hard and software, drivers maybe, but I thought I would mention my problem here. Some weird combination of soft and hardware causing this, but after a couple weeks of off and on testing, trying to fix things. I am thinking it is a problem with foobar, and hoping it will be an easy fix or that someone can tell me what I might do to fix it?

[Edit] fixed link for Live for Speed.

This is not making sense, 0.7 does most of things faster than 0.6*, CPU usage when playing should be much lower because post-processing bottleneck got fixed.
Make sure you have dithering etc disabled, post your full playback configuration (output data format, dithering, whatever), post your full system specs, try increasing foobar2000 process priority with task manager if nothing else helps.

Yes, that is why it took so long for me to say anything, it makes no sense to me either.

Settings I use have varied a lot and it does it always, even with everything off and at 8bit output (wav and directsound). However, a typical setting for me in foobar would be:

Normal install, add archive reader, kernel streaming, remove speex and mod support. Remove standard DSP package. Associate all supported filetypes and use the new tabbed interface (then I turn off the toolbar and use ascii buttons with file pulldowns, but who cares?)

Preferences are left at defaults except:
Core:Always send to playlist [Default] (On)
Core:Enable Multimedia Keys (Off)
Database:Database Enabled(On)
Default User Interface:Show Ascii Buttons (On)
System Tray:Always Show and Minimize to system tray (On) (On)
DSP Manager:Volume Control (Off)
Output:Kernel Streaming(On) (I have tried them all many times)
Direct Sound: Allow Hardware mixing(On)
Visualizations:Visualization Processing Enabled (Off)

Actually.. Ok, I just removed my install of foobar and installed a freshly downloaded .7 and used the default normal install. Same problem.

I raised the priority, that helped,. I raised it again, and it stops. Doesn't affect gameplay at all having foobar at a higher priority, even at highest realtime priority no FPS drop. Maybe the new optimizations are playing too nice and letting other processes crowd foobar out of getting enough CPU to run until I raised it?

As there seems to be no problem giving foobar permission to grab more CPU this solves my problem. That was a wonderful suggestion about process priority I never would have thought of, Thank You!

my system configuration
A7N266-E motherboard.
(original nForce v.1 with all the extra sound goodies, digital output, etc.)
(sounds nice to me)
768 mb of corsair DDR memory.
ti4600 Geforce video card
promise fastrack raid controller with two western digital 40gb drives
(Three partitions:Everquest, Other Games, Short Data Store)
board ide00 with a western digital 175gb+ drive
(Three partitions:Windows, Swap, Long Data Store (including music))
board ide01 with a teac dvd drive
two 80mm fans blow outside air across the hard drives.
two 80mm fans remove air from the top of the case.
video chip is cooled, even the sound chip is cooled with a heatsink and fan in good operating condition.

I dust, and check, the thing regularly, everything physically works. I built it right when the nforce first came out, I wanted to try the sound features, and while the diamond mx300 was a nice aurreal v.2.0 chipset card the windows xp drivers were not. I am using the latest drivers directly from the manufacturer's websites. Asus, Promise, Nvidia (no beta stuff other than foobar of course:)

Anyway, am going to reinstall the latest 0.7.1 beta and raise the priority and restore my settings. My problem is solved.

Oh, one thing I always want to do is change the asci buttons? Customize that string with symbols of my choice and add or subtract buttons from it? Sorta don't need brackets and such myself. I just started playing with those and haven't figured out how to do that. (Sorry just sorta tossed that in, didn't want to start a whole new thread and all, I don't even know where I would put it, maybe general?)

Ok, enough, Thank you for the help!

Oh I think I said that wrong, I should have listed my settings better.

under playback:
buffer files: 0
playback thread: max
Replaygain:album gain (or off)
do not use peak info to scale.
preamp settings I leave alone. 0.0?
Output data format:32bit-fixed point (Tried 16bit too, not sure which to use)
8,16,24,32 fixed-point settings are availible (tried them all)
16,24,32 all sound fine and they all skipped until I raised the priority
Show all options (Off)
Dither (Off) I never use it
Show clipping warnings(Off) Usually
Volume Control is Max and the Volume Control DSP is disabled
Output is Kernel Streaming (And I tested Directsound and wav outputs too).
I changed the buffer sizes to 2000, test all three and they all do it, I go back to 1000, they all still do it... driving me nuts. Getting it working with the priority trick is a relief.

I tried variations of most settings in foobar that might affect playback (and many that shouldn't) tested in LFS .7 skips while the others do not.. I could try more players looking for one that does skip, would that be helpful?

I hope that is more what you asked for?

OK, problem solved then... I don't quite understand why it happened, normal process priority should be enough unless some other software is going crazy. I also play music in background when playing fullscreen games, and I've never noticed such problems. I'll probably add a process priority setting for 0.7.2 so you don't have to use taskmanager everytime you start foobar2000.
Playing music with increased priority shouldn't have any bad side effects - default settings already give it high priority, and most common formats (MPC, MP3, Vorbis, AAC) don't need more than 1% of CPU time on recent machines. Priority settings don't affect total amount of time consumed, they only control CPU distribution between tasks, so game framerates should stay pretty much the same.
You may experience system slowdowns when performing some long tasks in foobar2000 (diskwriting, masstagging, replaygaining, etc), or a really nasty lockdown when foobar2000 freezes with 100% CPU usage for some reason.

Regarding custom ascii buttons - yes, they're planned (sort of).

Yes, that's all info I was interested in, though I still have no idea what went wrong.
Doesn't really seem like playback settings affect the problem anyhow if it happens with default config as well.

Yes, ok, I was a little worried about running it at the higher priority. I think I will increase it as little as I can get away with.. Since I like to use the latest beta there is more chance it could lock me out.

If you add a setting for priority then maybe offer settings between normal and insanely high?

Ah, yes it doesn't seem to affect the problem no matter what foobar settings I tried. Only increasing the priority is working. Keep thinking maybe foobar is being too nice about using CPU now and other processes can starve it too easy? but I am probably wrong, code is, odd, the way it all interacts (or doesn't) nicely.

Thanks again. Greatly enjoying foobar, all those neat options, and I love the interface!

[Edit for clarity, ok, i tend to 'talk' too much, when I talk]