Playback distortion/clipping - Microbook on Win Xp SP3

[guidon83]

Hi,

I experience some noise/clipping/distortion after a minute or two of playback. It happens on every program (FL Studio, Winamp, Vlc) and on every output (Main 1-2, headphones). If I stop the reproduction and restart the player program, it reverts back to normal playback without noise.

Here you can find a wav file long a bunch of seconds, into which I recorded the output while distortion was going on: http://www.sendspace.com/file/in6hwg

My system :

Windows XP Pro SP3
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo P8600
RAM 2,99 GB
Motu Microbook

Anyone could help please?

[1nput0utput]

Try raising the buffer size. There's a buffer multiplier setting in the MicroBook Setup window in CueMix FX.

[guidon83]

Hi

changing the buffer size makes actually the difference: the higher the buffer, the later the distortion shows up. However the problem turned out to be the integrated wifi card of my laptop. If I disable it and boot the system with no wifi connection, The motu card will work fine without any of the mentioned problems. I also had confirmation from MOTU tech support:

Hi Guido,

Sounds like you've found the problem, it's a rare yet annoying problem we see in Windows machines. Sometimes another driver, unrelated to MOTU, takes too long doing whatever it does. When this happens there is little we can do on our side, our driver is starved too long and simply falls behind because it get's there too late. Typically the worst offenders are drivers for network adapter cards, like yours.