Windows 10 - intermittent freezes

[sluggo]

Hello All,

It's been years since I've had a windows problem, but one has reared its head recently. I'll be using a DAW or Traktor, and every now and then everything just... stops. It's like a mini 2 second audio freeze. I don't see this as being DAW specific, as it's happened in Live, MuLab and Traktor. The sound will stop and any playback or transport action will also stop. I have noticed that my mouse is still active during these freezes, so it's not the entire OS that stops.

One thing it might be tied to Adobe Creative Cloud. My daughter is now sharing this computer with me and we have Adobe CC on it for some of her school uses. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about sharing. It's possible that Adobe is not the problem. I have turned off "start at login" and disabled all of the adobe background services that were labelled as being from Adobe.

I'm wondering if Windows collects any human readable log files to indicate to me why the audio would be freezing?

In years past I would just uninstall anything that might be taking up resources but on my current setup I don't have a lot of extras other than Adobe CC, and CC might not even be the issue.

I'm using a Native Instruments Audio DJ 2, the same one that I've had for years without this issue. My computer is an older Lenovo x220 notebook with a 250GB SSD and 8gb ram. Totally not super powerful but this is not an overload issue. The freezing can happen when playing back a single audio track.

thanks

[Kaine]

I've seen Adobe bridge do that to Cubase on a few machines, although it could be some other component of course.

Grab latency monitor (http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon) and test the setup, it should show up any process hanging the sytem.

[HanafiH]

My computer is an older Lenovo x220 notebook with a 250GB SSD and 8gb ram.

Update your drivers
Clear your computer’s temp files
Run a memory check
Adjust your virtual memory
Run a disk check
Run System File Checker
Disable C-States in BIOS

[Pictus]

20 ways to optimize your Windows 10 PC for music production
https://bandzoogle.com/blog/20-ways-to- ... production

[sluggo]

I've seen Adobe bridge do that to Cubase on a few machines, although it could be some other component of course.

Grab latency monitor (http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon) and test the setup, it should show up any process hanging the sytem.

Thanks. I ran the program and it came back with saying my wifi adapter could be causing problems. I disabled it and things seemed to work pretty good. But then the audio freezing happened again. I'll run latencymonitor again for longer and see what else it finds.

[sluggo]

20 ways to optimize your Windows 10 PC for music production
https://bandzoogle.com/blog/20-ways-to- ... production

Thanks. I went through it and made the suggested changes. It's still a work in progress...

[OzoneJunkie]

This could be an issue where the power settings for your audio card are set to "park" the card, in the name of conserving power. I had an issue when I first got my latest computer that sounds similar. Took me a while to track down.

What you want to look for is in the registry. Sound cards appear under this branch:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

And each individual soundcard is a numbered sub-branch, and the power settings for the card appear in the PowerSettings sub-branch:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001\PowerSettings

There are 3 settings:

ConservationIdleTime
IdlePowerState
PerformanceIdleTime

These are likely set to a numeric value that equates to a time duration. In order to not have the audio card park, set each these values to the max hexidecimal value of: ff ff ff ff

If you have more than one sound card, then you may have to do that for each soundcard. Note that not all sub-branches from the above mentioned path are actually sound cards, so only look for and change the PowerSettings sub-branch values. So, you do NOT have to add ConservationIdleTime, IdlePowerState, or PerformanceIdleTime to any sub-branches that do not have a PowerSettings sub.

Also, in previous Windows 10 updates, sometimes these values would revert back to their initial values. This behavior seems fixed in more recent Win10 updates, as I haven't had to set them back to ff ff ff ff in probably the past year's worth of updates.

Hope this helps and fixes your problem.

[cron]

20 ways to optimize your Windows 10 PC for music production
https://bandzoogle.com/blog/20-ways-to- ... production

Thanks. I went through it and made the suggested changes. It's still a work in progress...

There's really no need to optimise a machine for audio with a modern OS. Some tweaks can do more harm than good. Adjusting processor scheduling to favour background services is straight insanity unless we're talking ancient Cubase on an XP machine.

[metamorphosis]

Bullcrap.

Anyway, before you go optimizing Sluggo, check your hdd for SMART errors using hddscan (freeware), before and after running a chkdsk operation (cmd in administrative mode, chkdsk c: /f /r, reboot and wait an hour). If it's got uncorrectables, replace it.

Otherwise see guides below.
And run O&O ShutUp10

[Pictus]

More:
https://www.howtogeek.com/266621/how-to ... haracters/
https://forums.mydigitallife.net/thread ... ing.74482/