MobilePre and Jitter During Playback

B

bgavin

New member
I'm getting awful jitter on playback with MobilePre and laptop:

Dell Inspiron 2200
BIOS Dell A07
CPU Intel Pentium M - 1600 MHz
RAM 512mb as (2) 256mb DDR
Sound embedded SigmaTel C-Major

I wiped the system clean, and did a fresh install of WinXP/SP2 and all maintenance. I'm in the computer business, so I know the machine is clean. No memory errors, etc, no junk software in place. Latest Dell drivers for this service tag, etc, etc.

Initially, playback of any audio through WinMediaPlayer was jittery. MobilePre control latency = 256, bumped up higher and it plays back OK.

Playback problem remains with Sonar 403. Tried both WDM and ASIO drivers, all permutations of latency settings. Project WAV files play on a different machine without jitter.

I'm not finding anything on the boards or in Google about the jitter. Any suggestions on what to check next?
 
you're having dropouts... not jitter...

are you recording to the same physical disk as the OS? (partitioning won't help performance)
 
The problem resolution was the hard disk being stuck in PIO mode instead of the normal UDMA-5 mode. Reloading the BIOS defaults was the cure.

Before resetting the BIOS, Windows would only allow PIO mode on the disk. The BIOS is the most current version and it does not allow the user to change disk modes. I have no idea how it got changed.

I loaded my SiSoft SANDRA Pro and it reported the drive only running at 10% its normal performance. Sonar was reporting some 75% disk usage during the playback with all the dropouts.

I restored the system from a known-good Ghost image to wipe away all the droppings of SANDRA and other changes made during problem diagnosis. This is the only way to return to a known-clean system. Uninstall just does not do the trick.

I reinstalled MobilePre and Sonar, then did all the WinXP tweaks to rid the system of unnecessary services. It runs great.
 
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