Music on hard drive skips

[delta013]

Recently when playing music in Windows Media Player off my hard drive there are skips and pauses in the music.

This happens in multiple files. At first I thought it might be that the data on the hard drive had errors on it, as I have had to cold boot my computer several times recently due to another problem. However, after listing closely to the music and its skips, I noticed that they don’t happen in the same places twice in a row. I’m assuming that means that it is a performance issue and not an error in the files.

When playing a DVD it also skips, even though there is no visible dirt or scratches on the disk.

According to FreeMeter my hard drive is the only thing that is being pushed to its performance limits while the music is playing, and it’s not at maximum all the time.

Normally I am able to play the music clearly even while running an MMORPG, and even if my memory is at 90%-100% usage.

Right now I have one Internet explorer window open, one MS Word doc and WMP. My memory is only at 50% usage and CPU at 12%. Yet I’m still getting skips.

My specs:

Toshiba Satellite 5105-S701
Mobile P4 1.8 GHz
512 MB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM
60GB HDD, 2 MB buffer, UltraATA-100, 4200 RPM

Keep in mind that I have been able to play the music perfectly fine with these specs in the past. Something has changed, either with the files themselves or with how my computer is able to play them. If it is a performance issue then something is different that is taking up more resources then it should.

Also I just copied the music to another computer and played it. I didn’t hear any skips, so that pretty much rules out errors in the data as the cause.

I would appreciate any help you guys can give me on this.

Thanks all.

Delta013

[Force Flow]

What O/S?
What version of WMP?

Try scanning for viruses (AVG is free in case you don't already have AV software), and spyware (adaware and spybot).

Defragging may also help a little.

[Craig100]

Check which tasks are running in the background, also follow force_flows advice, could be some annoying spyware there. but certainly check backgroud tasks, you may have a task running taking up a lot of processing resources that is not needed.

[delta013]

Sorry about that, I'm running Windows XP Home and WMP 9.

I already ran AVG Anti-virus it turned up negative. I just ran Spybot S&D and came up with 3 registry entries for WurldMedia, I cleaned them out, but it’s still skipping.

The main thing that is taking up my CPU is System Idle Process. Even while the music is playing it’s around 90% or more.

Delta013

[delta013]

I just checked windows update and they had a new version of my sound drivers available. I downloaded it and did a reboot. Still skips.

I think it may be system idle process that’s taking up the hard drives resources.

Delta013

[glc]

No, system idle process will always take up the slack between running processes and 100%. All this means is that you don't have processes hogging your CPU, so you need to look elsewhere for the problem.

I'd look at using an alternative media player.

[delta013]

I ran defrag, it still skips. However I did notice something that I found to be out of the ordinary. My hard drive is 60 GB, defrag said that the average file size was 258 or 298 KB and that my cluster size is 4 KB, which makes most of the files much bigger then the clusters.

Upon GLC’s suggestion I installed an alternative media player, WinAMP, guess what? It still skips.


Delta013

[glc]

That's not out of the ordinary.

Have you contacted Toshiba yet?

[DragonNOA1]

Turn off details and all the little options in windows explorer (that are on the left hand side panel). Turn visualizations off in WMP. How many songs do you have in your music folder? My mp3's skip too randomly too and i think it's because I have so many songs in one folder that XP likes to keep reading all the files or something. Try putting groups of mp3's in seperate folders and defragging. It's really not too bad and I've kinda given up on it with XP. On the other hand, no skips under 98SE, go figure.

[delta013]

I turned off visualizations. I moved it to the C: root. I moved it to a folder on my desktop. Still skips.

I seem to notice a spike in hard drive usage on FreeMeter when the skips occur.

Windows task manager will only tell me what programs are accessing the CPU and memory.

Is there a program that can tell me what applications are accessing the hard drive?

Delta013

[delta013]

I did another troubleshooting test. I played the music on another PC and it sounds fine. I then played it on my Toshiba laptop off the hard drive of the other computer over a network. When doing this it skips. Doesn’t that mean that it’s not just a problem with hard drive access?

BTW it also skips when playing simple MIDI files.

Delta013

[delta013]

Just to update everyone I have reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled XP, the music is fine now. Must have been a driver or other software problem.

Thank you everyone for your help and input on this problem.

Delta013