Stuttering and popping/cracking sounds in audio playback

Sometimes when I listened to the music on a computer at work, I would notice short pauses during the playback and I thought that probably the MP3 track was badly ripped or encoded. Those are really short, a couple of milliseconds pauses, but they annoy a lot and spoil all the listening pleasure. Then I started noticing that the same song plays just fine on my home computer. Moreover, the audio track would not always stutter at the same place, but at random places in the song. I was confused, but didn't give it much thought, until one day I learned about deferred procedure call latency on kernel-mode device drivers. Basically, some hardware components (and their badly written drivers) can cause that stuttering or even clicking/cracking/popping sounds. It affects not only audio playback, but any data streaming. If you are simply copying data, you will not notice that, since it doesn't really matter when stuff gets copied, but if you work with audio and video, you might notice dropped video frames, audio stuttering, etc. By reading the forums, I discovered that in most cases the network and wireless cards are to blame, and the problem is fixed by replacing the cards with other models that do not suffer from that problem. For example, most Broadcom wireless cards are considered bad, and suggested to be replaced with Intel wireless cards.

There's a free tool called DPC Latency Checker that analyzes your computer and graphically shows if your hardware is suitable for audio/video recording/editing/streaming. More info is available on their web site, along with a link to download the utility. Most computer users don't even notice such things, but for example, for musicians doing recording/mixing on the computer it's essential to have a machine free from the described issue. [L]

My 5 year old Dell Inspiron 8600 is OK :) because fortunately all the hardware components put together are good.



And a brand new Dell Latitude D630 with a Broadcom network card is not only impossible to use for music recording, but even music playback is not smooth.