Troubleshooting

[tahnan]

So here's what I determined (with temvald's help).

Occasionally, the sound from my computer sounds corrupted. Kind of garbled, as if it were waterlogged. (Henceforth, this will be referred to as "IT".) This is most notable with iTunes and with Deadly Rooms of Death; when I play music in Windows Media Player, I don't get the garbling (though I do get hiccups--out of the sound, I mean, not me myself).

Pressing ctrl-alt-del and looking at the process list, and comparing the results before and after the garbling starts, shows no differences, either in what's running or in how much memory things are using.

When I pause playback on iTunes and then start it again, it sounds fine for anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute, and then IT happens again.

CPU usage is around 20-30%. At one point, just after IT happened, CPU usage spiked to 74%, and then dropped back down to 20-30%. But often, usage doesn't seem to spike notably.

Quitting various other things--SSH, Trillian, Guidescope (an ad-blocker)--had no effect. (Nor does disconnecting from the net.)

Anyone have any thoughts as to what's causing this and how to make it stop?

Comments

[zanthrin.livejournal.com]

Just some random thoughts ...

1) What hardware (sound card) are you using? Can you tell the system to use the software-sound system (or a built-in system on the motherboard) instead, as a test? That would let you know if it's a hardware/software issue on the specific card, as opposed to any other system interaction.

2) Boot up in "safe" mode, and play for a bit. It'd be a more extreme test than closing other processes.

3) Do you ever get the garbled part immediately after starting, or is there always a period of "good" play first? If there's always a good period, that tends to rule out an unrelated, periodic event taking place in your system, since you'd expect to see that happen immediately in some cases.

--Tom

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I was just about to try #2, and post to answer the other two, when I saw Jofish's reply below. That seems to have hit the nail on the head--I've been having wireless problems for a while, in fact. But: thank you so much for helping!

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

Do you have a wireless network connection? It sounds to me that it's likely to be a searching-for-wireless problem. Try disabling it (or your wired if you don't have a wireless, although that's much less likely) and see if you still have the problem.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Feckin' brilliant. That seems to have been exactly the problem--my wireless card has been having issues for a year or so, unable to reliably hold a network connection, in part because it's constantly refreshing the network list. And disabling the wireless connection has done wonders. Thank you!