Music Skipping

hey, i have a 15gb hdd that is filled with music, my problem is the music sometimes sounds like its skipping. i know that its not the music thats wrong because i tried all of them and they skip.th copied some of them to my master drive and they played just fine so i know its the drive.what can be causing this? heres my system specs. 2.00ghz p4,400watt psu,80gb IBM, 15gb Maxtor, 52x CD-rom, USB burner, Winfast TV PCI card, Firewire card. and 3 80mm fans.

Sounds like your old drive's access speed is too slow or is in a desperate need of a defrag or has the wrond irq and/or dma settings applied

this drive worked fine just a few weeks ago before i used it on another machine.its a 7200rpm maxtor

i doubt its the read speed. is your computer overclocked? and is the southbridge hot?

stan03 said:

i doubt its the read speed. is your computer overclocked? and is the southbridge hot?

Click to expand...

Agree, Mp3's at it's highest resolution(320kbps) equals a bandwidth need of 40 KB/s. If your HD can't take that..... It has to be dead!

My first thought after ruling out dead drive is to defrag... give that a shot.

I sinceerely doubt it is any defragging problem, or any drive performance problem. I also doubt it's anything related to IRQ because well, what ISN'T PnP these days? ...Ide.


I would take the drive out and try it in a different computer, or try transferring the songs to a different hard drive in the same computer(BOTH if possible) and using that deduction to follow the steps. Is anything else on the drive aside from the music? If the answer is no, it *may* be the drive failing(I find this unlikely as well). If you say yes I'm thinking something is using up your resources causing this to happen.

The first and easiest thing you can do is reinstall your audio driver. Make sure you uninstall the driver, restart, reinstall the driver, restart.

What sound card are you using(Or Mobo if it's integrated) and what program are you using to play music?

Is the 15 GB Maxtor on the secondary channel with the CD-ROM? If so, remove the CD-ROM and try it.

Also, go to Device Manager and open the primary or secondary IDE controller and check that device 1 is set to DMA if available and that it is set to UDMA Mode 5

^^^ Dukeman said exactly what I thought right when I read the first post. The secondary HDD is probably sharing a cable with the CDrom and UDMA is not enabled.

that is possible, but are you saying that the bandwith of a cd-rom isn't enough to stream music...? if so then how can a cd-rom play music.

The mp3 are on a HDD. If the HDD is on the same IDE cable as a CD which does not support UDMA, then the HDD is using PIO mode which will cause the cpu to work harder.

Hello! Didn't anyone hear me? The bandwidth demand of a 320kbps mp3 file is only 40 kilobytes per second.
Even a floppydrive is almost fast enough to deliver that amount of data...The most crappy HD I have in stock right now is a old 512 MB Quantum disk. It will do 1000 KB/s+ data transfer rate.
Even if I hooked it up as master along with a 52X cdrom as slave (on the same cable, The total bandwidth-need wouldn't exceed even a old ATA33 interface... And it should be able to play mp3's from the hd and the cdrom simultaneously as long as the cpu has enough power to decode 2 mp3 streams at once....

My roomates Centrino lap-top did not have UDMA turned on, and even his MP3's skipped. The problem isn't raw power or bandwidth. The problem is that the CPU can only do one thing at once, and in PIO mode it does two things at once. This is what causes MP3 to skip.

no, the slave HDD is connected via the slave connector on the IDE thats connected to the master. the cd-rom is all by itself on another ide. i checked devie manager and it says that device one has a transfer mode of pio and it says dma if available

Make both channels on both IDE channels say DMA if available. You'll probably have to restart.
Windows...

DaWiper said:

Hello! Didn't anyone hear me? The bandwidth demand of a 320kbps mp3 file is only 40 kilobytes per second.

Click to expand...

Yes we heard you and your argument eliminates the drive as the issue since the slowest communication speed (necessary to even detect the drive) is enough to stream mp3's.

Ultra ATA specs that each device on a cable should have independant access speeds so if the HD was master and CD was slave the HDD would still operate at UDMA speeds. (The other way around may not work on some CD-ROMs as the master maintains the registers for the slave.)

As we know now, the HDD's are on the same cable and windows is not seeing the fastest transfer rates from the drives. As the drive worked in this computer and another OK the drive is again not the issue. The issue is the driver and windows detection of the drive's supported protocols.

ati...
Reinstall the chipset drivers for your board. Removed the devices from the Device Manager and reboot. If windows automatically installs drivers and they this does not get both HDDs to UDMA Mode then manually install the proper chipset drivers and reboot.