Windows: Distorted Sound, starting ITunes & Renoise

Whenever iTunes is running when I start Renoise, I get static and distortion on playback. I can only get Renoise to play properly if I shutdown iTunes and restart Renoise. I can run both applications properly if I start iTunes after Renoise has been started.

Can not reproduce this here, but which SoundCard do you use with Renoise? Which SampleRate and so on…

Are you using a different sound device (or different playback settings) for the general playback (default or system playback) in OSX than in Renoise? Aka, how looks your “Audio and MIDI Setup” (Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app) configuration?

I’m running Windows XP on a Thinkpad T43. The soundcard is an integrated SoundMAX card from Analog devices.

In Renoise I’m pretty much running factory setup, ie device type: Direct sound, out Device: Primary sound device.

Regards
/Jesper

What if you toggle the hardware-buffer checkbox in Renoise in the Audio Preferences?

Ah, on Windows.

Could you maybe try if the same thing happens with any other applications? You could try this with the Reason or Live Demo for example.

If that happens with any applications, we can not really help you here. Have you already checked if there are updatd drivers for your sound device available?

I’m experiencing the same problem on and off in WinXP SP3.

In contrast to the description in 7kilo’s thread I’m using DirectSound (not ASIO) in my setup and a reboot fixes the problem. Sometimes I can even run iTunes and Renoise in parallel, both playing at the same time without trouble - so I can’t really reproduce the issue.

If someone has found a solution, please let us know.

Try to make sure that both apps, Renoise & ITunes are using the same samplerate. Many drivers have a problem when running on different rates in different applications at once.

Spot-on! This indeed seems to be an issue concerning sample rate/latency settings.

Using DirectSound I get:

22050 Hz: no sound at all
33075 Hz / 50 ms: occasional crackles; no crackles for latencies >60 ms
44100 Hz / 50 ms: loud crackles; no crackles for latencies >80 ms
48000 Hz / 50 ms: loud crackles; no crackles for latencies >80 ms

Using Asio as Device Type the status reports “unavailable” - another audio application is running.

This means iTunes blocks the driver. Either it doen’t support running multiple clients, or ITunes is set up to exclusively use the driver. You can change the default sound output settings in ITunes in the quicktime sound preferences. Have you tried fiddeling with them as well?
Which soundcard/driver do you use? Have you already checked on their support forums if theres a common solution to this problem?

I’ve tried different settings in the QuickTime sound preferences without an improvement. Even after closing iTunes/QuickTime the system seems to be affected and the only way to get rid of the crackles is to increase the latency setting in Renoise.

My system is running with an age-old SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio driver (v5.12.1.5240). I’ll see if the latest version is of any help and will check the respective support forums.

Itunes is really buggy, it is not a problem of Renoise but really Itunes itself:
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&clie…oeken&meta=

Not running iTunes resolving this issue is the best to hope for but in some cases uninstalling is the only way to resolve it.

I have no idea why the software behaves so crappy but it’s a pity that Apple did not improved it over the past few years.