Ticks and Clicks: 9z4 Special Mode

[boleary]

Quote
but it does now however there are regular "clicks" which improve (but don't disappear) when the buffer size is increased.

Please don't use this (Special Mode), if this is happening. You actually won't know what you'll miss more than some skipping parts which "tick";
Think about the number of samples you will be implying (latency), and how often something may be skipping per second without you noticing it.
I kept away from Special Mode for as long as ticks happened, and now they have gone here, it suddenly sounds marvelous at the same time for everything and all. Can be coincidence, but I don't think it is.

Last night I suddenly had no music, just clicks and ticks that occurred about every ten seconds or so with silence in between; it was very weird, never heard before. Bumped up my buffer size to 48 and my latency sampling to 6 (Q1 @ 2) and it went away. The only time I perceive clicks, and they are not loud, is between tracks. Am I using a buffer size or sampling that is too low? How do we decide what's safest? Sure don't want to stop using Special mode. 

[PeterSt]

Last night I suddenly had no music

You mean that before it worked ?
If so, I'm afraid that leaves nothing much more than you investigating what suddenly happened to your PC ...
(Don't forget your wife's sabotage potentials)

Or is this not what you mean ?

[boleary]

Yes, before it worked, for about the last four days. I changed albums and suddenly I just had those noises. Retried the music I had just played and still no music. Changed the settings above and all was fine. The only change I made was earlier in the day I increased the size of my ramdisc. I had reduced it  a couple of weeks ago trying to get Strauight Continuous to work.

[PeterSt]

The only change I made was earlier in the day I increased the size of my ramdisc.

Well, did you change it back already ?
And don't think this won't matter ! it matters all !! (the PC being far more busy with the "few" memory left)

[boleary]

No, I didn't change it back. I increased the ramdisc from 750 mb to 2 gigs. All seems to be working again with the changed buffer size and sample rate.

[boleary]

Another weird happening. I just played an SACD version of Dylan's Highway 61 version of "Like a Rolling Stone (It sounded great). I then tried playing the red book version to see if there was a difference in the sound but was greeted by the clicking and ticking phenomenon described above. I then switched back to the sacd version and all is well. All was done with the below settings.

[PeterSt]

Strange ...
The only thing I can think of in this case, is that redbook as such would be a little more demandiing because of the upsampling. But, this should only be apparent at "track part loads". Not throughout.

but ...

Do you use "Don't start Playback at all" ? If not, you could try whether this helps (I can imagine that).
Also, when you now use "Start during Conversions" it sure will help to *not* do that.

Both of the above are related to a somewhat doing too many things at the same time, and at these low latencies the OS can get behind, and next stays behind forever.

Lastly, a very obvious cause can be a wrong folder structure. This is by itself a bug (only discovered this a few days back myself) and you may not notice it further, but this is about the music data not being at two levels down from the root (as how it ever was not allowed), but higherup. This makes the Wallpaper Coverart (ChangeWP) look through about everything, and while this is the most CPU intensive all will hardly play. Now think where your redbook is compared to that hires album (or just look in TaskManager if you see ChangeWP in there forever).

I'm fairly sure this all won't help you, so : strange ...

[boleary]

Update: So I deleted the SACD version of the Highway 61 album from ramdisc and loaded the red book version of the album. The redbook version of Like a rolling Stone  now played fine! ( I think it sounded better than the SACD version). I  then copied the SCAD version of the song into the Redbook Highway 61 folder that was on the ramdisc. Now the SACD version played fine but the redbook version was back to clicks and ticks! I then deleted the SACD vesion and am currently listening to the redbook version again   All with the below settings.

[boleary]

Do you use "Don't start Playback at all" ? If not, you could try whether this helps (I can imagine that).
Also, when you now use "Start during Conversions" it sure will help to *not* do that.

I'll give "Don't start Playback " a try. I don't use "Start During Conversion" at all.

Lastly, a very obvious cause can be a wrong folder structure. This is by itself a bug (only discovered this a few days back myself) and you may not notice it further, but this is about the music data not being at two levels down from the root (as how it ever was not allowed), but higherup. This makes the Wallpaper Coverart (ChangeWP) look through about everything, and while this is the most CPU intensive all will hardly play. Now think where your redbook is compared to that hires album (or just look in TaskManager if you see ChangeWP in there forever).

I've generally had a problem with folder structure since I started using ramdisc. First I manually copy/past albums into ramdisc. Using the "copy to XX drive" just doesn't sound as good here. About half the time I get an error when I then try to play the album. However by creating an empty folder on the ramdisc drive and pasting the album into this empty folder I don't get any errors.

[PeterSt]

Ah, well, something like that indeed. Officially (at this moment) you should add another folder under that. So, something like :

\Music\RamMusic\Albums\[tracks]

but even more officially

\Music\RamMusic\[AlbumName]\[tracks]

because this latter will better show the Album Name in the Wallpaper I think ...