Windows 8 audio glitches troubleshooting

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Sipaliwini
Posts: 436
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2014 12:40 pm

Windows 8 audio glitches troubleshooting

Post by Sipaliwini » Sat Mar 22, 2014 3:26 pm

We recently realized that Windows 8 has some issues with the hardware of some computers, causing sub-optimal audio performance in Aerodrums.

Here are the symptoms: when you first start Aerodrums and use the default audio buffer size (128 samples) and recommended device (WASAPI), the sound is badly distorted.

There is a good chance this is caused by Windows 8's way of allocating resources to the Bluetooth, WiFi and audio hardware.

Here are the steps you can take to troubleshoot this:
  • Close Aerodrums.
  • Press the Windows key + C, or swipe in from the right edge of the screen to open your Charms.
  • Select the Settings charm, and then click Change PC settings.
  • Select Wireless.
  • Change the Bluetooth setting to Off.
  • Change the WiFi setting to Off.
  • Start Aerodrums.
  • In the Latency screen, selected WASAPI Exclusive and experiment with low values of the Audio buffer size slider.
If your computer has keys to physically power off the WiFi and Bluetooth hardware, we recommend doing this instead of using the Windows 8 interface.

If these steps do fix the audio glitches/high latency in Aerodrums, in most cases we have observed, re-enabling WiFi will not bring the glitches back.
If these steps don't help, you can use a higher audio buffer size. 256 samples should always work, and at 5.8ms buffer related latency, in WASAPI mode it will yield an overall latency between 10ms, which you may not notice.
We are researching the issue further to understand how to consistently reach buffer sizes in Windows 8 as low as in Windows 7.

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