XXHighEnd

With SFS set at 430 as any track nears finishing playing approx 10 seconds from the end, music stops then after 8 seconds music back and track finished. We have a blackout of music the counter keeps ticking though.

Resetting at 50(your safe option) all works fine. This is with straight contiguous. I find I have to reboot between changing SFS and reload music files in XXhigh.

I do suspect SFS sounds better higher, but more work to do on that front.

I've read your onboard tip on both SFS and Contiguous and I would like to understand it better. Is this info on this site somewhere?   

Aha ...

This is a fairly easy one : your notebook is too slow. Maybe (just maybe) the disk has spun down in the mean time (of playing), and spinning it up can just matter that 8 seconds. So, see in energy settings whether that may be the case.

So, notebooks *are* slow, and processing this near 2GB of music data (which an SFS of 430 implies) most probably takes more than the time available for it (which is ~14 seconds). In that case, indeed (see other topic/post) lowering the SFS helps, and you can work your way up from that low amount (like 50) until it breaks. Notice that this shouldn't be tested with too short tracks, or otherwise *that* will limit the amount to process. With really larger tracks the silence may happen in the middle somewhere because it doesn't fit in memory in one go. In the end the amount in-memory depends on the output sample rate as well. So, the higher the less will fit (in one go).

Btw, because of the way you report about it, it is my guess that you play in Attended Mode; If this is so, make that Unattended, and your problem will be gone, or described differently (I'm almost sure).

The "SFS" is one of the more mysterious phenomena, and I guess hundreds of posts can be found in the forum (just apply search). Today, in general the higher SFS brings the better sound, but there is a limit, like my 430 which seems to be the "breaking point".

Regards,
Peter