Re: [ARSCLIST] Soundcard/iTunes phollies

[Eric Jacobs <EricJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've not tested this hypothesis to a great extent, but anecdotally it
seems that iTunes is much less efficient at handling VBR encoded MP3s
than Fixed Bit Rate MP3s, whereas WMP seems to handle VBR and FBR MP3s
equally well.

Anyone else notice similar VBR/FBR difference between iTunes and WMP?

Eric Jacobs
The Audio Archive
tel: 408.221.2128
fax: 408.549.9867
mailto:EricJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Tom Fine
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 4:46 PM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Soundcard/iTunes phollies


This post may be of help to a Windows user having playback problems with
iTunes. I swapped in a
M-Audio Delta 2496 card to replace on-motherboard junko-sound in a computer
and a strange problem
resulted. Playback of MP3 or MPEG or whatever in Windows Media Player was
just fine. Likewise for
RealPlayer and other assorted playback software except for iTunes/Quicktime.
Sound would be chopped
and full of dropouts. Apple's website was marginally helpful, at least it
gave me a clue where to
look. After going through Apple's checklist of things to "fix" and coming up
empty -- including
updating to latest M-Audio driver and DirectX software -- I noticed their
instructions for the older
versions of Quicktime involved tweaking the hardware buffer. I checked out
the M-Audio controls and
noticed that by default they are set for small-size buffer and thus low
latency (since the
presumption is that they'd be used for recording or as part of a small
Protools rig). I increased
the buffer size to 1024 samples from 256 and the problem went away.
Apparently, iTunes/Quicktime is
such a resource hog that it needs more data-caching than any other media
player on this computer.

This cure might not work in all cases or with all cards but I figured I'd
share. I think most
soundcards have a place either in their control panel or in their device
driver panel to set latency
and/or buffer. I must also add that the M-Audio card -- bought as B-stock
from BSW for $70 -- sounds
far better than the Intel on-motherboard sound chip.

-- Tom Fine