Editorial Windows 10 1903 Has a Nasty Audio Stutter Bug Microsoft Hasn't Managed to Fix

[TrantaLocked]

Anyone experience audio glitches with an HT Omega Fenix PCIe card? I've tried the solutions mentioned in the article and comments and no luck. On occasion the audio will freeze in a glitchy way for a second then go back to normal, never happens with Realtek or USB dacs.

 

[x7007]

Anyone experience audio glitches with an HT Omega Fenix PCIe card? I've tried the solutions mentioned in the article and comments and no luck. On occasion the audio will freeze in a glitchy way for a second then go back to normal, never happens with Realtek or USB dacs.

Hey, which drivers do you use for this card? I have the Omega HT PCIe card and I don't know if to install the official HT OMEGA drivers or the https://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/

 

[Mussels]

I dont think this is relevant to any modern audio problems, since this is a windows bug from 4 years ago

 

[barbaroja9]

It is relevant, as Microsoft never actually cared about the thousands or maybe millions? of music producers out there. For me, it rendered an otherwise perfectly, $1700 firewire audio interface useless. I was forced to upgrade because in W10 1809 there was also a limitation with the number of FLS slots available so I could not open two projects at the same time without running out of plugin slots.

Pete said nothing changed in the firewire audio system but it is not firewire related, it is audio subsystem related. And it is obvious something changed. I got 3 firewire audio interfaces and all of them are good for nothing now. Talk about electronic waste.

Easier way out is to postpone and negate issues and later on say that the support for your windows version is over, like they did with this MAJOR issue.

Screwing people up is an accepted practice nowadays.

 

[trparky]

Um... Firewire hasn't been a thing for more than seven years. Hell, even Apple, the people who made the standard, don't even care about it anymore. Maybe that should tell you something.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It is relevant, as Microsoft never actually cared about the thousands or maybe millions? of music producers out there. For me, it rendered an otherwise perfectly, $1700 firewire audio interface useless. I was forced to upgrade because in W10 1809 there was also a limitation with the number of FLS slots available so I could not open two projects at the same time without running out of plugin slots.

Pete said nothing changed in the firewire audio system but it is not firewire related, it is audio subsystem related. And it is obvious something changed. I got 3 firewire audio interfaces and all of them are good for nothing now. Talk about electronic waste.

Easier way out is to postpone and negate issues and later on say that the support for your windows version is over, like they did with this MAJOR issue.

Screwing people up is an accepted practice nowadays.

Sorry man you shouldn't be running this version of Windows anymore. If the problem happens on 22H2, then indeed I may agree with you. FireWire is a dead standard, though. Might just consider an old Mac for your DAW setup. Good luck.

 

[Mussels]

Firewire is way older than i realised

Designed and made by Sony, Apple and Panasonic in that order - not just apple, but this fits with my memory of it being popular for high speed transfers from sony cameras and camcorders to apple devices for video editing, and where that started for apple originally.

"Steve Jobs declared FireWire dead in 2008" And that was that, Thunderbolt replaced it.

It's a very odd thing to be upset about, when you can run any other OS to use that outdated hardware - just because you spent so much money on a firewire device doesnt mean something a fraction of the price cant be superior to it now.

limitation with the number of FLS slots available

This says something is incorrect with your FLS comment - you never explained or referenced your issue OR the hardware
Load more VSTs : Effectively removing the FLS Slot allocation limit in Windows 10 - Windows MIDI and Music dev (microsoft.com)

In the case of FLS Slots in Windows (going back to at least XP), that explicit limit was 128 per-process. That means, each application could have, at most, 128 FLS slots allocated.

As mentioned above, the limit of 128 Fiber Local Storage slots has existed in Windows for a long time. This wasn’t something new to Windows 8 or Windows 10. However, most musicians hadn’t previously run into this because they would hit processing and latency limits before they hit a limit on the number of unique plugins they could use at once.

As it turned out, the existing limitations were baked through several parts of the FLS source in the kernel, and were not simple to adjust up or down. So, the developer rewrote the FLS Slot storage and allocation/deallocation code to be more robust and extensible in the future. We picked a max number of slots for now (around 4k) with the understanding that any existing limit will eventually be hit, so it had to be much easier to change in the future. So, once we hit the 4k slot mark in an application (or get close) we can easily increase that limit to something larger.

You may wonder why we’d have limits at all. Having limits today helps prevent runaway allocations or other crazy things that buggy or malicious code might do. Allocating 4k FLS slots isn’t going to cause issues. An app allocating a few billion slots probably isn’t something we’d want to see happen.

As a musician, the only thing you need to do to take advantage of this, is running a recent version of Windows 10 (1903 or later).

So it sounds like you actually had your problem completely wrong - that issue always existed and 1903 has the fix.

 

[trparky]

"Steve Jobs declared FireWire dead in 2008" And that was that, Thunderbolt replaced it.

God, that came out when I was four years old.

Thank you for making me feel old. /sarcasm

 

[Mussels]

God, that came out when I was four years old.

Thank you for making me feel old. /sarcasm

I'm older than firewire, google, and wifi.
This was quite the trip down memory lane.

 

[Athlonite]

I'm older than firewire, google, and wifi.
This was quite the trip down memory lane.

Oh man now I feel positively ancient what with being older than the internet and probably all personal computers

 

[jarvis1996]

Wanted to post my solution to the audio stuttering I was encountering. It may or may not be the same type of fault referenced by the OP, but since people will come looking for solutions to Windows' audio glitches in general, I think it's still worth sharing here.
I am on a fresh install of Windows 10, on a Dell laptop with 8th generation chipset.
After trying *all* the standard 'solutions' posted all over the web, including updating every conceivable driver and messing with absolutely anything that could possibly be related to audio, nothing worked. But a couple of articles had suggested that various types of power-saving settings might potentially be involved. With that thought, I went to look through Windows' advanced Power Options, and noticed a PCI Express --> Link State Power Management section and it looked like the best candidate for causing issues, though it was a reach.
But lo and behold, when I switched its 'Plugged in:' setting from 'Maximum power savings' to 'Off', or 'Moderate power savings', the audio glitches disappeared. I was literally playing audio while I changed the option back and forth, and the audio stuttering came and went depending on whether I selected the original 'Maximum...' option or the 'Moderate...' option (or 'Off') respectively. So, an immediate and night-and-day difference.
I ended up keeping it on 'Moderate...' since that option worked perfectly well and I can still benefit from... whatever power savings that gives you.
I taxed the machine by playing a bunch of YouTube videos on top of the music, plus making lots of 'ding' system sounds (which used to exhibit the stuttering effect), all at the same time, and I couldn't get it to stutter while on the improved power setting.

And so it was that Windows had claimed more days of my life. But at least I won in the end. And maybe now you can too

 

[TrantaLocked]

Hey, which drivers do you use for this card? I have the Omega HT PCIe card and I don't know if to install the official HT OMEGA drivers or the https://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/

Back then I was using HT OMEGA's driver, but the stock Windows 10 driver works perfectly. You might also want to try disabling your onboard audio in the BIOS. I'm not sure if the stuttering was fixed in Linux as it's been a couple years since I had it installed.