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Audio Distortion while running uTorrent


shkbobo

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No, this is not about what I downloaded.

This is about my audio becoming distorted while I'm running uTorrent - and being perfectly fine when I turn it off.

I don't know how it's interfering with it but I think it might just be the hard drive usage.

I tried playing songs from other hard drives and they are also distorted.

The distortion gets more severe when more torrents become active and less severe with less torrents active.

CPU usage stays under 10%, eventually stays under 3%.

Memory usage is between 16-25mb but that's only because I have ~1000 torrents in the list.

Are there any settings I may change (hard drive usage, caching, etc) to fix this or do I have to live with never running my utorrent while playing music?

thanks ahead.

*SOLUTION*

As Ultima, Switeck, and I presumed, this was a strictly hardware problem. I ran a few hard drive benchmarks and realized I was getting an average data throughput of 2MB/s on my hard drive - very slow considering it's a relatively new hitachi 7k500, which should get over 60 MB/s average.

I had an IDE extension card laying around which I installed and am now using that to temporarily connect the IDE hard drives. Aparently legacy IDE support really is crappy on these newer boards so I will just deal with this extra card for now. I think I will fiddle around with BIOS settings and see if I can get the onboard parallel ata to go full speed - if not, I'll just transfer everything to a 500 sata drive.

But for now, my uTorrent is happily seeding close to 1000 torrents, while I'm enjoying clear flawless sound. :D

So what is my advice?

Update your drivers, experiment with various hard drives, and test their speeds...because it can easily be a number of things. Obviously my problem grew exponentially as I put more strain on the hard drives, so I already knew where to go. In the same way, you have to figure out what - if anything - changes the distortion problem. I would test the network separately, hard drive separately, and possibly other onboard devices.

good luck and a big thanks to the utorrent mods for being helpful.

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This could be caused by a weakness in your networking software or hardware.

Does the audio problem seem to decrease when you are only running 1 torrent with no more than 20 connections max?

Can you see if you can make it worse with LOTS of torrents with lots of connections each going at once?

What software firewall and antivirus software do you have, if any?

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The distortion gets more severe when more torrents become active and less severe with less torrents active.

Hash checking makes it a LOT worse.

And capping my upload speed (like if I made it 1KB/s max) reduces the distortion greatly (rare bursts that are hardly audible).

Switeck, the network isn't showing visible signs of poor performance. My speeds aren't affected nor have I had any other problems. The network card is a marvell yukon 88E8056 pci-e gigabit controller, one of two onboard gigabits on my Asus P5K Deluxe. I am not using an antivirus/firewall. (it's a brand new install of XP)

Ultima, the sound is fine when all torrents are stopped.

I'm disappointed because I had the exact same setup on my old computer and it worked fine. I would seed all of my torrents and play audio and it was just dandy. I transferred my uTorrent folder and settings to this computer (along with the storage hard drives) and now it's giving me all this sound distortion. Regardless if I'm using analog or digital out, the problem remains.

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Ugh, I don't really have any answer for you, but I'm more inclined to believe that it may be a lower-level problem (hardware and/or related drivers).

I experience some funky stuff with my computer too, but not because of µTorrent. When I have my headset on, and I move my mouse (PS/2 mouse; I could use USB, but don't care really :P), I hear a really low-volume buzzing noise. It's a tad bit more audible when I'm click-dragging something.

I've an Asus P5B-E (not sure if this commonality means anything).

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That is weird, Ultima.

I guess I'll start searching for help from asus for this issue.

You're probably correct in saying it's a lower-level problem because I got a hunch it may be a setting gone wrong in BIOS or something like that. Legacy IDE always creates problems on these newer boards.

Thanks to both of ya for the helpful answers and the effort. :)

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How about trying to run µTorrent with no torrents active and DHT disabled?
Ultima, the sound is fine when all torrents are stopped.

:P

Honestly, it sounds like it's happening only when either the network is accessed, or disk/RAM is accessed more than a GUI problem, but who knows -- still worth a try, I suppose :)

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You're using an onboard audio right? i have had the same problems with motherboard integrated sound cards couple of times. That's why they suck, you can hear all kinds of glitches, especially if you also have an onboard network card. You can hear hard disk usage, network card usage. Everything going thru the same mobo with the audio chip.

This kind of noise if mostly audible when using headphones (naturally), and it is annoying.

my 2 cents on it. If you want it to stop, buy an external sound card (i.e. PCI-card one)

Cheers.

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I am having the same problem but a completely different hardware set-up. I would tend to think it more on the line of something with an interuption of the data stream. My system config:

MoBo: PCCHIPS-M863G (w/ob audio)

PROC: AMD Duron

PCI Audio: Soundblaster Live 24-bit

OS: Vista Ultimat

HDD: 2 internal and 2 external

Utorrent Ver. 1.7.2

I have the exact same symptoms as you described. I get the distortion thru both on-board audio and the PCI audio. I have tried playing audio from all 4 drives and still have the distortion. I have the Utorrent program files loaded on the internal slave drive. I would believe even though the program files are on a drive other than the OS drive there would still be plenty of data streaming on the OS drive such as cacheing and playing audio regardless of file location is also streaming data on the OS drive. I would tend to think this is a more common problem than we are seeing. Maybe if more people would report there system info we can get a better idea. Has anyone had this problem with audio files and the Utorrent program both on the OS drive and useing the latest Utorrent version?

Oh! has anyone specificaly tried playing audio while running torrents in Utorrent and not having this problem? If so please list your system info so we can try to norrow this down to something common.

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Thanks for the reply "ajones81" I will try winamp ans see if it works clean. I was just wondering a few minutes after my post if it may be a conflict between Utorrent and WMP. That is the only app. I have used for audio and just discovered the problem this morning. I just started useing Utorrent last night. This was the only thread I found on the problem. I wonder if "shkbobo" was useing WMP? I will post the results soon!

OK I have installed winamp and still have audio distortion. I had a near lock-up just prior to my last post. CPU maxed at 100% physical memory at 85% and I could not shut down Utorrent. I rebooted and came to the forums. I saw the post from "ajones81" and thought I would try winamp. Well I have installed winamp and I am getting the distortion every few seconds without even starting Utorrent. I opened task manager and found Utorrent running under the processes tree and I can not end the process. I never had these distortions until I installed Utorrent and I cant kill the Utorrent process even though I dont have the client running. Something fishy going on!!

OK it is a problem with utorrent without a doubt! I have uninstalled utorrent! At first after uninstalling utorrent was still active in the process tree and unstoppable. After rebooting all signs of utorrent are gone and audio is clean even with CPU at 100% and 80% memory use. With utorrent installed but not having started utorrent audio was distorted to some degree and got worse with CPU load didnt have to be CPU demand from utorrent just CPU demand from anything. However utorrent was running in the process tree even without starting the GUI client. I will put a pointer In the bugs forum to this thread. Many thanks to "ajones81" for his post that led me towards this deeper investigation. Now hopefully the techs can get to the root of the problem.

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@spat72: I read your post and let me just say I have used WMP 10 & 11, Winamp, Foobar, RealPlayer, QuickTime, MPC, VLC, KMPlayer etc. etc. with uTorrent without any problems at all till date. I must confess I have never used onboard audio till date on any of my machines. In fact, probably one of the first things I do when I get a new machine is to disable onboard audio from the BIOS and install a good standalone sound card (I've never installed the drivers for onboard audio either). Of course, unlike a lot of people I can actually make out the difference a sound card makes, even without but esp. more so with a good set of speakers.

I have also used uTorrent on a Core 2 Duo machine with a Creative X-Fi Xtreme sound card and Win Vista. Again, onboard sound disabled and no problems at all.

A friend's PIII with an MSI MoBo seems to experience no audio-related problems either with uTorrent running all the time on Win98 SE. He uses onboard audio (AC97) BTW.

So I think it's your particular hardware that is causing the issues and a software solution may not be likely. Upgrade when you can afford it, and get something better. You can also try updating your BIOS (be careful) and all the MoBo drivers and see if that helps (probably a good idea to do it anyway).

BTW, does any other torrent software cause the same problem? If not, then it may be that uTorrent is aggravating the existing h/w issue somewhat.

For the record, I've never experienced any isses with the uTorrent process either (refusing to be killed etc.) and it has never maxed out my CPU at 100%. Only a few huge programs like Photoshop, 3D Studio Max or Video encoding have ever succeeded in doing that to my CPU anyway, but never uTorrent whose USP itself is its tiny footprint! :P

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You're using an onboard audio right? i have had the same problems with motherboard integrated sound cards couple of times. That's why they suck, you can hear all kinds of glitches, especially if you also have an onboard network card. You can hear hard disk usage, network card usage. Everything going thru the same mobo with the audio chip.

This kind of noise if mostly audible when using headphones (naturally), and it is annoying.

my 2 cents on it. If you want it to stop, buy an external sound card (i.e. PCI-card one)

Cheers.

Indeed you are correct SadPanda, but I was using a digital coaxial output. My motherboard also has optical digital out, so it isn't a run-of-the-mill onboard sound. I very much considered getting a proaudio soundcard but the fact of the matter is that they would need either an external or a front panel connector to feed out digital coax - a very ugly and inefficient way to just get my PC to produce digital sound in a simple RCA cable.

And for the record I was using foobar2000 with 24bit output. I would never ever dream of turning on WMP, lol.

I fixed my problem, read first post for details.

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