MP3 stutter since converting to NTFS (1 Viewer)

[Rob Gillespie]

I knew there had to be a drawback. Since converting nearly all of my drives to NTFS 5 yesterday, playback of WAV and MP3 files, either through Windows Media Player or WinAmp 2.74 suffers from occassional glitches and stutters. I imagine this is down to the disc I/O getting interrupted. I'v even got the WinAmp MPEG buffer up to 12000kb but it doesn't seem to have helped.
I don't really want to go back to FAT32 now, so any ideas?

 

[Dominik Droscher]

Do you have a SB Live? If yes the problem may be solved by putting the card into another PCI slot. This seems to be the only almost always working solution for these problems on Creative's card.
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-Dominik Dröscher ICQ: 25318265
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes."
[Edited last by Dominik Dröscher on September 02, 2001 at 12:10 PM]

 

[Kelley_B]

I don't think that this has anything to do with your I/O, for me it was just the opposite, I recieved better MP3 playback from WinAmp once I moved over to NTFS. How fast is your processor? What ATA are your drives running at? There are other things that could be causing it. Are you running a VIA chipset on your Mobo? So many factors.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

PIII 600E
Asus CUBX (no overclocking)
2 x IBM 75GXP 45gb drives running through the CMD ATA/66 controller (each drive on it's own controller). Device Manager is showing the drives running in UltraDMA mode. I'm on W2K SP2 so the UDMA66 is already enabled.
Soundcard is an SBLive! 1024 Player.
Playback in Winamp was excellent before I reinstalled W2K onto NTFS yesterday. The only thing that has changed are the drives being in NTFS, so it is either that or another side effect of the W2K reinstallation.
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[Dominik Droscher]

Try to change the PCI slots of the SB Live. I have the same card and experienced the same problems. But after I changed slots is was gone. The Creative newsgroups are full of this problem but the only solution that helps most of the time is to change the PCI slots. Never ever put it in the first slot on asus boards (at least not on an A7V but who knows ).
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-Dominik Dröscher ICQ: 25318265
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes."

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Thanks, but I've tried it and it hasn't helped (at least not by much).
My Sandra scores are about the same for the HDs. The SBLive drivers are the same. This is ridiculous. The OS has been installed fresh with a more efficient file system and the sound is now glitchy? Pile of crap.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Been running Win 2K with NTFS for many months and MP3 playback (with every player I've tried including Winamp) is flawless. It's not NTFS per se (obviously)...
My gut feeling also points at the SB live. Check for conflicts etc. What IRQ is it at? Is anything else at the same IRQ? Etc.
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/Kimmo

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Yes, most of the devices on are IRQ 9 because of ACPI. No way I'm getting rid of that. It worked before. No reason why it shouldn't do now.

 

[AaronNWilson]

Rob I can't give you a reason why, but my brother has 2 IBM 75GXP 45 gig drives in a raid 0 setup and I noticed that his mp3 delivery doesnt seem to be as smooth as it is for me on my 20 gig maxtor. I really dont know why this should happen, are you also in a raid 0 setup?
Aaron
edit: Rob I just remembered that my brother noticed that while his overall speeds are the same under NTFS the access time is higher. The access time doesn't seem to be uncommon (but microshaft never mentioned that it increased access time when installing win2k GRRRR). Anyways when running HD tach which shows access across the whole hard drive platter he noticed that there is a VERY severe dip at one point in accessing the HD platter. You may also want to download HD tach and run the same test to see whether you are also getting the severe dip since you have the exact same harddrives.
ps- My 20 gig maxtor never showed any dip going from FAT32 to NTFS so I would imagine it is IBM specific and I have heard from another person who went through 3 75GXPs in a row and all of them failed and he said he will never buy another IBM drive.
[Edited last by AaronNWilson on September 02, 2001 at 03:29 PM]

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Hi Aaron.

are you also in a raid 0 setup?

Nope, just two drives on their own IDE (ATA/66) controller channels. I like resiliance, which is why I've never gone down the RAID 0 path. Having two drives independent of each other makes life very easy.
Anyway, I don't have a RAID controller

It's interesting that you mention the IBM issue because I was just thinking the same thing!
I know about the improvements NTFS has to offer, but on my own system I'm seeing no performance improvements that I can detect. In fact, I'm convinced it's not as snappy around the desktop. You know that feeling you get when things just aren't quite as good? That's what I'm getting now I'm on NTFS.
But anyway, I'm going back to FAT32. I haven't got time to mess around with this for the next few days. I've taken a Ghost of the Windows 2000 partition with a minimal install on it so I can go back easily enough if I want to try NTFS again. As I type I'm transferring my main files over to the second drive so I can re-partition the first. All I need do then is Ghost back my Win2K partition (FAT32) from a few days ago and I'll be singing again.
The main objective this weekend was to get my partitions sorted out. I had an installation of Mandrake which I've wanted to remove for a while. The NTFS thing was just an experiment, albeit one that one horribly wrong
Something else. I've gotten more and better advice here than I have posting the same problem on AnandTech. Damn I like this area!
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[Kimmo Jaskari]

For the record... ACPI, everything on IRQ 9 and Soundblaster Live sounds like a recipe for SERIOUS trouble to me.
I make a point of disabling ACPI in the BIOS on desktop machines prior to installing the OS, especially Win 2K (at least on my own machines). You don't really need it and chances are excellent - especially with any legacy stuff in the computer - it will foul things up bigtime.
That is why you saw no difference moving the SB Live around, it was still on IRQ 9 thanks to Win 2K and ACPI. I'd say that would have solved your problem otherwise if you hadn't been using ACPI.
NTFS is a Good Idea in virtually all cases. One exception would be if you want to dual-boot Win 98 for some reason.
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/Kimmo

 

[Rob Gillespie]

But Kimmo - it was working perfectly fine before the reinstall and convertion to NTFS and had been for the nine months since my last installation of W2K.
And the system is a dual-boot with 98. Why does that make a difference?

 

[Dominik Droscher]

Rob, try to disable ACPI. You can do it via the Device Manager. Select Computer -> Advanced ...(ACPI) and "update Driver". Here you select "Standard PC". Try to play around, perhaps this helps. It did not help when I had the problem though, as I said, it went away when I played a little with the PCI slots. If you want further help you could try the Creative SBlive Newsgroup. There are a lot of people experiencing this problem on this otherwise great card.
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-Dominik Dröscher ICQ: 25318265
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes."

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Thanks for the help, but I'm back on FAT32 now with practically no audio glitches.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Dominik and Kimmo's ACPI suggestion has been playing on my mind, so I gave it a try, by changing the Computer setting in Device Manager to 'Standard PC'. It messed about with devices and drivers for about ten minutes and then came back up with everything on different IRQs (they had all been 9 with ACPI). SBLive! is now only sharing with the USB controller (which is very rarely used anwyay).
Result: It's helped a lot. Even after going back to the FAT32 configuration, I was still getting some pops and jumps in playback. This was about ten times less than I was getting when the system was NTFS, but due to that I suppose I was noticing it more. Now however, I'm getting no jumps and just a very occassional pop (quiet and unobtrusive). Obviously I've lost the ability to put the machine into Standby, but that's a small price to pay for the improvement.
Thanks fellas!

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I was referring to a dual boot where Win 98 and Win 2K are on the same partition. If you do that the partition has to be FAT32 since Win 98 doesn't speak NTFS.
Glad you got it working better. ACPI is a great idea but it does require the PCI cards to be extremely "well behaved" for want of a better term.
Personally I have had problems with my SB Live too, even without ACPI. It wound up sharing an IRQ with my network card, a 3Com one, and whenever there was load on the network card the sound would sometimes dissolve into a screech for a second or so. I eventually ditched the 3com card since it was only a 10 mbit and bought a faster D-link card and have had no problems since, but the D-link card is not on the same IRQ as the soundcard either.
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/Kimmo

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I've been tinkering further. I've now got the SBLive! on an IRQ all of it's own and have disabled both of the serial ports in the BIOS (freeing up two IRQs). I swear there has been a slight increase in system performance. It feels a *tad* more snappy.
As for WinAmp, it seems a lot happier. I've altered some of the settings to get it to buffer more data. I still get an occassional crackle, but it's pretty quiet and really could be caused by anything I suppose. Judging by the WinAmp forums, it seems you have to tinker a lot with those settings before hitting the optimum. I'm just noticing every little fault now

 

[AaronNWilson]

Rob i still can't figure out why are getting cracks and pops at all. I never ever get any cracks or pops. I even just tried running winamp, then loading photoshop 6 then loading media player 7 and watching an mpeg movie and there was nary a hitch or pop or crackle.
I have a 800mhz p3
448 megs ram
SB live 5.1
Aaron

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Well, whatever is causing it now doesn't seem related to disc I/O load, at least not directly and not that I can tell. I've been playing tracks and at the same time loading as many apps as possible, opening Explorer, jiggling about with thumbnail views, copying files from the same directory as the track - you name it, and I haven't been able to get it to glitch. It happens whenever it feels like it.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Mmmm... I'm not getting anywhere with this. I'm sitting here with just IE and WinAmp running in Win2K, listening to an Enya album and I get an occassional blip, or glitch in the sound. It's not overly obtrusive, but it is noticeable. Loading other apps doesn't seem to make much (if any) difference.
Earlier I tried printing off a 30mb Publisher file, whilst at the same time surfing and using WinAmp. Though the machine response got a bit slower (always does when printing), WinAmp didn't hiccup at all.
Once the printing had finished, I then burned a 700mb CD-R, at x12 while surfing, loading other apps and messing about in Explorer. This time I got more glitches. Again, not horrendous, but still there.
I'm sure this isn't a disc I/O issue. It just doesn't tie in with what I'm doing on the machine. Perhaps it's just an issue with the mobo, drives, everything together. Dunno. It's not a serious problem, but once you notice it you tend to listen out for it more. Certainly nothing like how it was over the weekend. I've tried tweaking the WinAmp settings, with big-ass buffers, different output devices, you name it. Seems to make very little difference.