Audio clicks and splats - Windows

springhead

I changed my home pc a few months back.  It's a Lenovo tower PC, core i7, 2.1GHz, 8GB RAM, Windows 11 Home edition.

When it's streaming audio - Spotify, YouTube or anywhere, I get occasional audio splats.  It also does it from Reaper and sadly also seems to record splats.  I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2nd gen.

I've tried a couple of different interfaces and Asio4All instead of the Focusrite driver.  Same result. I've tried different USB ports, unplugging everything but keyboard, mouse and interface.  Same.

Maybe I've got a duff PC and should have sent it back but by the time I spotted it I'd moved everything over from my old dying PC and registered software etc. So major ball ache.

It's running via a mains extension board with some filtering and surge protection.  Doesn't seem to be related to heating or fridge turning on and off.  I haven't tried listening to audio off the on board headphone socket, to rule out USB, but even if that's clean it doesn't me do what I want with it.   

Have I got a duff PC or has anyone got any suggestions? 

brucegill

I don’t know anything about PCs as a Mac user, but if I ever get pops and clicks, it’s generally mismatched sample rates. Maybe no help at all, but worth checking

Winny_Pooh

Yeah check sample rate of interface and set internal to 44100 for non recording stuff.

You can also use this to find general audio issues.
https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/DPC-Latency-Checker.shtml
Once running you can use task manager to stop some background tasks to see if they are affecting audio streaming.

springhead

Good thinking.  It was set to 48KHz, I've forced it to 44.1 and watched a bit of YouTube but still splatting every 30 seconds or so. 

PhilKing

8gb of ram with Windows 11 seems low.  Not sure if it is a streaming problem with not enough buffer space. 

springhead

Might be worth adding more I guess.  Seems to be sitting at around 70% in use.