Why does network activity affect music quality?

G-MAN2004 · 19 Jun 2016 at 17:03

Not streamed music, but music that I've already downloaded? I've got music playing in iTunes and downloading a game off Steam at the same time and it is affecting the sound quality quite a lot. It sounds like it is skipping every few seconds.

This happens every time, no matter what I'm downloading using whatever program. As soon as I pause the download however, the music plays normally again. :confused:

vidda · 19 Jun 2016 at 17:32

It's more common than you think, usually caused by bad drivers.

This website has a tool that can help you investigate the problem, but considering it happens when you start downloads, you've already identified a problem area to look at anyway: http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/solving-dpc-latency-issues/

bledd · 20 Jun 2016 at 10:08

Try..
Update drivers

or

Buy an Asus soundcard

Also, iTunes is a pretty poor music player on Windows, badly made software.

Kei · 20 Jun 2016 at 14:42

I've had this occur when the download is writing to the same disk where the music is stored. Quite frequently occurred during payday 2 updates for me as they seemed to be heavily disk intensive. This is with an asus soundcard with the most recent drivers. Output method didn't have any effect as I tried ASIO, WASAPI and direct sound. It's only when I opened task manager on the performance tab in windows 10 could I see that one disk was at 100%. (disk with my music partition and also a steam library)

matthab · 20 Jun 2016 at 14:47

BoatyMcBoatface said:
Also, iTunes is a pretty poor music player on Windows, badly made software.

Really, what basis do you have for that. iTunes is far better than it used to be.

skyripper · 20 Jun 2016 at 14:55

BoatyMcBoatface said:
Also, iTunes is a pretty poor music player on Windows, badly made software.

matthab said:
Really, what basis do you have for that. iTunes is far better than it used to be.

Has the advantage that people with ipads and iphones are very comfortable with it to play music in the house.

It has turned into a bit of a bloaty beast, and the fact it never remembers the tickbox for "Would you like to download [yet another] new version?". Its still my number one choice as it holds my music library and is controllable from any number of phones in the house.

KIA · 20 Jun 2016 at 16:43

matthab said:
Really, what basis do you have for that. iTunes is far better than it used to be.

Slightly better, it no longer bundles Quicktime.

165MB, too many processes and services.

The OP should try something other than iTunes. I like Clementine, MusicBee & MediaMonkey.

joeyjojo · 20 Jun 2016 at 17:34

Kei said:
I've had this occur when the download is writing to the same disk where the music is stored.

This was my first thought too - assuming it's playing off a HDD, the problem is more likely to be hammering the storage than the actual network adapter.

bledd · 20 Jun 2016 at 22:30

KIA said:
Slightly better, it no longer bundles Quicktime.

165MB, too many processes and services.

The OP should try something other than iTunes. I like Clementine, MusicBee & MediaMonkey.

There's adware that has less crap bundled with it

asim18 · 23 Jun 2016 at 20:54

iTunes is the worst thing to listen to music on. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple hasn't even added some sort of file buffer to keep tracks in memory in order to reduce elongated/slow read requests. It's probably slowly thrashing your hard drive at the same bitrate as your music

, which is what is causing an interruption when your download needs to get written to disk and the next 128kilobytes of your music needs to get read at the same time. A well configured music player will read ahead, sometimes the entire track in one go, and keep it in memory while it's playing, instead of slowly reading all the time at the actual bitrate of the file.

As others have suggested, install some software which is actually designed for playing back music on a computer and it will have proper file reading techniques in place, as well as manually let you adjust the size of the audio buffer.