Sound glitches when I search or do something outside of Traktor

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Sound glitches when I search or do something outside of Traktor

Hey, so I’ve been DJing for a while now, recently got a recurring gig in a local bar last week, and though not noticable to the trashed clients, it was noticable to me and more importantly, the manager.

Basically, Traktor runs fine unless I
A) start doing other things outside of Traktor, like looking at facebook (I have a dual monitor set up at home)
B) Search or half the time when I’m loading a song into another deck.

My laptop is running Windows 7 64-bit, AMD Dual Core blah blah, 2.4 or 2.6 GHZ, 4 GB of ram.

Now I know, I could always have more ram and a faster processor, (inb4 get a mac), but there’s another DJ at the club on saturdays, he plays cheesey 80’s and what not, he also uses Traktor, and another DJ that plays indie on wednesdays who uses Traktor.

Now, Cheese has a crap laptop, a craptop, if you will, his music collection is huge compared to mine (Triple figures in the GB. Blatant pirate, he even admits to people, yet he’s still high payed and the manager doesn’t realise he’s cheaping on the job. Anyways, balls to him), and he runs fine without a hitch. Like, insulting smoothly. Then Indie Boy, he has a collection around 30 GB, but he uses an entry level mac (When I say entry level, I mean like, 3 year old entry level) and I know it’s a Mac, but it has lower specs than my laptop and I just refuse to believe these two guys can get away with it when I’m stuck here with a (relatively) beast of a laptop that for some reason is failing.

From other people who have suffered a similar fate, they suggested that it was to do with my graphics chip, and this I could understand, the chip on this laptop is it’s only let down, I recall it being an ATI Radeon x1200, and it runs Counter-Strike smooth at just under max settings. So I turned off aero, and this helped SLIGHTLY. Also, there’s no way Cheese the Pirate has a better graphics chip than that in his tiny, dirty, illegitimate netbook.

I’m at an end here, I’ve closed down all background processes, turned off aero, all those streamlining methods, and it’s still there. I’m sick of Cheese the Pirate and his craptop advising me on my setup, I need to fix this in the next few weeks or my gig is up and I’m back with no money haha.

Things I think it could be, but have no idea how to fix:

  • Graphics Card. Well I do know how to fix, buy a new laptop. However, could the dual monitor settings be affecting it?
  • External Hard Drive. it’s a 1 TB seagate, my music library is 60 or so GB, since all the jumps are mainly when I’m accessing it, surely thats the problem… But how do I fix that? I’ve accessed files off my laptops C: and D: (it has two internal HDD’s) and it’s still done it if I recall.

Also, I’m not sure if this is the right forum, I know if anyone can help it’s you guys, and there’s no general help section on these forums so… I guess this goes here.

Please help!

Edit: I forgot to mention Cheesebeard’s cracktop (can you sense my distaste towards him?) is running vista, 64 bit apparently.

2

Usb soundcard? could it be soundcard and HDD on the same USB controller.
I would start looking there before graphics cards.

3

well, i’d say dont blame it on the graphics

your external drive seems an issue though.
i have my collection on internal hard-drive and have traktor working like a charm (2 year old dual core, 3gig ram)
think about having a dual boot, maybe too much crap on your system bringing your machine down.

4

You tried running dpclat and seeing whether it’s a driver issue?

5

Ive got a few suggestions:

  1. Turn off your wifi adaptor
  2. Dont do ‘other stuff’ on your lappy while djing
  3. Get shot of that external drive.

External drives are much slower than internal, especially if its a budget model. There are 5400 and 7200 rpm drives on the market. I recommend you get the faster and swap out your old drive for something big and fast.
If thats not an option, just do a test: load up some of your tunes on your local HD and see if it still stutters.
Heres some food for thought too; what if someone stole that little external drive youre on, mid gig? It wouldnt take much to wrench it out of its usb port.
In my opinion, external drives are a necessary backup, but shouldnt be used as primary.

Also, kill all your card readers. I had mine crash traktor after every 20 mins randomly the other day.

If all else fails, it could be simply that youre using an AMD chip. I have heard of people having issues with their cpu’s before.

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Hey mate i run win 7 64 bit also. Best advice i can give is to disable your network adaptors and battery in the device manager, run gamebooster to kill unnecesary processes and process hacker to trim the services even more. Run latency checker and latency monster to isolate cpu spikes etc. For me the battery was the big one, disabling that has worked woners :slight_smile:

7

… Disable the battery? hmm. The drive is 7200 apparently. I’ve gotta go to work now, but when I come back I’ll try all the suggestions, thanks for the quick reply guys!

8

either disable it or take it off completely. run latency monitor you will see how it affects things. just dont bump your power cord while playing or its all over ha!

9

If your graphics card is shit don’t use a dual monitor set up.

10

I found I only needed to disable the Power Management driver, not pull the battery.

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12

thats not entirely enough information but “Amd dual core” is likely the culprit.

amd processors and chipsets handle usb traffic in a radically different way than intel processors do. even worse is the different chipsets even from amd handle traffic differently. let alone SIS chipsets or a few other vendors that come to mind.

It’s this reason that Serato flat stopped supporting amd processors. In laymans terms, it has to deal with how amd’s handle the frequency polling clock of the bus via hypertransport. while hypertransport is standardized, the way in which the clock and northbridge interface with those chips is drastically different.

as has been mentioned here, go into the power control panel and set it to high performance. then also go into device manager, find your “usb root hub” selections and uncheck “allow computer to turn off this device to save power” on the power management tab of each of your root hubs.

depending on your configuration you may need to do this every time you reboot your system.

on the downside, high performance will eat your battery at a much faster rate than you are normally used to. so giging while pluged in will be an absolute necessity.

if none of that works, then you can try updating your laptops bios to see if you get better response times on your usb bus. this is something amd works on constantly so bios updates are something that can improve usb performance, but again. keep in mind theres a reason im mentioning this last. its never the first thing i would try and if youve never done it before, i would reccomend having someone else that is familiar with this process doing it for you as there is some risk of bricking a laptop if you dont know what you are doing. although its not common for that to happen, the risk is there.

good luck

13

try to put some songs in a pendrive to see if the problem is the hard drive
i have an amd turion x2 2.3 with 4 gb ram and i don’t have problems (i don’t have the battery connected)
i have the glich problem only in the shift and juggle buttons of my vci-100

14

@Sambo
What Soundcard do you use ? Can’t find it in your description.

:roll_eyes:
you got too much time while DJing :wink:

15

[quote]1) Turn off your wifi adaptor
2) Dont do ‘other stuff’ on your lappy while djing[/quote]

^this

sorry but i’m pretty much against people doing that, giving the rest of us the “checking our email” reputation

follow NI’s guide to optimize Win7

16

This, and what’s your latency set at?

17

Aight, solved! Turns out it was the External HDD, it was just slow transfer I guess.

To clear something up, when I said doing other stuff whilst DJing I meant when I’m sat at home, I have facebook/google/whatever on one monitor and traktor on the laptops screen.

Thanks for all the help guy, seemed like an absolute **** storm of problems could have caused it haha, but it was the external hard drive that fixed it for me. It still glitches if I load something intense in the background but that’s to be expected haha.

So yeah, thanks again!

18

I have similar problems. I own Amilo pa3553, amd turion x2 rm-72 2.1ghz, 4gb ram and so on. When playing in traktor, about every 20 sec I get cracking from speakers.
Interesting thing is that I am using audio 2 dj and the latency is set to 5.5ms and when I try to increase it, it only gets worse.
Also, having trouble with video cards. It has hd3200 and hd3450. Windows expirience rating gives me only 3.5 for graphics and I can’t even play WoW normally.

I was thinking to install xp sp3, but should I even bother trying? On ati site there are no drivers for these graphic cards for xp.
Also, is xp better for traktor than win 7?

19

Forgot to mention that I already tried to reinstall win 7, both x64 and x86 but everything is the same…

20

Just came back to say, what a fun time I’ve had! turns out it wasn’t my external HDD! It was ASIO4ALL’s latency. I switched it up to just straight putting through to my speakers and it’s latency is faster and now there’s no glitches even when I’m doing something on the other monitor.

I don’t even know why I was using ASIO4ALL in the first place, so. There you have it.

As for the intermittent audio drops, that sounds like a buffer issue. If you’re using ASIO4ALL, try and increase your buffer size. It increases latency, but I’d rather have laggy response time than audio drops.

Or, time the audio drops and use them rhythmically, if you’re a total pro!