J River MJ12 Pops/Clicks-Effects help needed?

Well everything plays just fine until i try and use the DSP effects in J River MJ12.
When i check my task manager while using the DSP effects the computer usage is not going wacky or anything so i don't understand. I posted over on J River forums about this but have yet to get any resolve on this. On some threads i was reading over there, some people are saying to get the best sound quality to not use the DSP at all. But i do think it would have added some benefit to some of my live recording ambience for sure and i would have liked to have utilized some of the effects. The eq section works fine and i am only experiencing these clicks in trying to use the effects portion of the DSP in MJ12.
And i have tried all the buffering options i could to get this to go away and it will not.
Using the direct sound did not correct this either and it is certainly not as high quality running that way with the sound card i am using.
I just yesterday switched to purewave instead of WMD in my sound card and the sound even opened up and improved more. The only downside of using that is that i think it disabled my ability to listen to Youtube and other sound on my computer.
So i need to enable that again if i want to do so i think.
Still learning over here for sure!

And as far as my computer not being fast enough well i am not so sure?
I have been doing some music editing and mastering and do use Sound Forge and other programs that i know can tax a computer and i very seldom have had any glitches while operating these programs.
Even if i have all other programs closed out and just running MJ12 i still experience the clicks.
So i am clueless at this point as to why.

But I have to repeat how much i love this player thus far for it's sonics compared to the WMP9 that i had been running for years. My system and ears are certainly enjoying it.

There are a lot of PC USB deficiencies, both hardware and software that can cause these pops due to high latencies or interrupt conflicts. Usually custom drivers have higher latency. Non-Windows ASIO can cause higher latency. Upsampling or decompressing Flac etc. also causes more latency. Dell laptops are notorious for having poor USB interfaces. It is almost impossible to get rid of the pops on these Dells. All USB ports on computers are not equal, even on Macbooks. Macs are the most trouble-free I have found.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

> But should i still be hearing this if i am averaging a
> total of 40% computer usage in my task manager?

Remember that I listed several causes. High CPU utilization figured into some of those causes and not others.

Keep in mind that audio playback is a real-time task. If the buffers ever underrun, you hear a pop. So if there is a momentary bottleneck that delays MJ12 from refilling the output buffers, the result isn't satisfactory. Windows doesn't have good facilities for reliable real-time The 40% and 60% numbers aren't impossibly high but it does suggest that your PC CPU isn't very fast for the job. Right now, I'm playing Flac files on a low end dual core AMD CPU and seeing 1% CPU utilization.

I suggested switching to the Processes tab in Task manager and watching the CPU utilization by individual processes. watching I/O activity is also informative.

I'd try increasing the buffering as I described in the first post. The current setting may just be wrong for your system. (There is a similar buffer setting for Direct Sound output in MJ12. You might switch to Direct Sound and play with that buffer setting to see if you get pops and clicks with a smaller buffer using Direct Sound.)

> I closed out all other programs

You may have to bring up the A/R program and change its settings. It probably will not appear as a task on the Start bar.

You haven't described your computer hardware and soundcard. When you post in the J. River forums, provide that information. You can get some of that info from the Help/System info command in MJ12.

Bill

Thanks for all of that Oldlistener!!

But should i still be hearing this if i am averaging a total of 40% computer usage in my task manager? The highest peak i saw was a very quick 60%.

So yeah i am hearing those clicks with 40% computer usage as from what task manager is showing.
I closed out all other programs and it is still there but the thing is that i was able to use it just fine for a brief moment and then when i went back i started hearing this clicking when trying to use the effects

yeah my next step was to sign up over there at J River and post about this issue.

thanks again!

The pops and clicks are probably caused by buffer underruns. MJ12 isn't always feeding audio data to the ASIO driver fast enough. There can be several causes:

- Too much other CPU activity competing with MJ123. When you turn on effects, you ask MJ12 to do more processing. Bring up task manager (Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to get Task manager running.) Click on the "Performance tab. Watch the CPU usage graph as you play music. Look for high usage and spikes in usage. Then click on the "Processes" tab and then click on the "CPU" column heading. Scroll down so that you are looking at the processes that use the most CPU time.

- Your CPU is just not fast enough to do the effects processing. Follow the Task manager drill as described above.

- Your ASIO buffer settings are just too small. In MJ12, bring up the Tools/Options/Playback menu and click on Output mode settings. You will see a slider for setting buffering. Your ASIO driver may have a way to set buffering through its control panel. Increasing the amount of buffering can also help with the CPU problems mentioned above.

- Your anti-virus s/w is checking every file you read. This can bring any Windows PC down to a crawl. for most A/V software, you can turn off the constant monitoring and just let it check email and downloads.

- If you are also upsampling in MJ12, that increases the amount of CPU time needed. It is not a good idea if your PC is old, slow or heavily loaded.

The clicks and pops probably have nothing to do with clipping.

The J. River forums for MJ and MC are a better plac eto get advbice than this forum. More users willing to help.

Bill