For some time now, fb2k has stuttered and made static sound whenever i've done something hard drive-intensive or cpu-intensive. For example, if I open up a large RAR archive, or move a bunch of files in explorer... or if I run md5sum on a large file. Is this normal? I seem to remember a point, a long time ago, when this didn't happen for me. Is it preventable?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Nobody will be able to tell you, unless you post some information about your system such as which foobar2000 version and which output mode you use, your operating system and your hardware.

First things to check would be if your drive works in PIO or UDMA mode, and how big is fb2k output buffer lenght.

I have a similar problem. It got worse after I reduced my buffer size. The thing is that the larger the buffer, the longer the sound takes to react to volume changes... I couldn't cope with pressing mute and waiting 4 seconds for it the sound to stop...

System:

fb2k 0.8.3
direct sound

Athlon 64 3200+ Venice Core
1 Gig DRR3200 RAM
Audigy ZS 2
Music stored on a hard drive partition approaching fullness (dunno if that would make a difference)

(sorry for the long delay -- i've been away for a while. i should have posted more specific details about my system)

i use version 0.8.3 on winxp sp2. some details about my system:

asus a7v motherboard
1.1ghz AMD Athlon
768 SDRAM
creative sb live!
i use direct sound 2.0 with hardware mixing and a 1000ms buffer.
both hard drives are 7200rpm, and DMA is on.

EDIT: could this have something to do with the hard drives being on Primary/Secondary IDE Channels and not on Promise Technology Ultra IDE Controller? I can't remember exactly why i had to avoid the Promise slot on my motherboard, but I think it either had to do with failure to detect the drives, failure to detect their proper size, or crashing.

bump?

If you use a "asus a7v motherboard", that probably has a SiS IDE controller.
Check out the SiS taiwan website for potential IDE updates to the IDE controller.

I use an ASUS A7S333 Mobo, update helped a lot, bumped me from PIO4 to UDMA3, working laglessly now.

Don't know if this can help.

Check you PSU. One of my colleges solved his problem with stuttering playback from a WD hard disk by using a better power supply.

The A7V uses a VIA chipset, not SiS as far as I know. Also, Windows reports both drives in UDMA mode (one in UDMA 2, the other UDMA 4).

2 Via ATA66 controllers via a 686A and 2 Promise ATA controllers via a PDC 20265. Anyway, since DMA is working, I don't think that is the problem.

I would:

Update the SBLIve drivers if you haven't already. If the official Creative ones work poorly, try the default Windows ones.

Update the Via 4in1 driver for your board.

Switch the SBLive to a different PCI slot. The PCI implementation on the A7V wasn't bad, but it could be a little more picky then on modern boards, and you have no APIC IIRC, so its worth a shot.

Update to the last official A7V bios. I'd recommend this as a sort of last resort since I had some issues with the last bios that took longer then they should have to resolve (specifically it broke BIOS adjustment of my CPU voltage forcing me to use the jumpers, but I have a 1.0 board, so thats probably why).

AHh many thanks - I had Speedfan running I was getting stuttering using FOobar and I came across this thread and it seems to have fixed my problem!!

Many THanks!