Music Playing Problem on Computer

[John Gutmann]

When ever I play music in either iTunes or limewire it skips every few seconds and I don't know why I will close everything taking processor power or RAM and it still does it. Any ideas?

Thanks,
-John

[Jeff K.]

Mine does the same thing recently. Before I never had a problem. This only happens to me though when I run Firefox with iTunes. I can run Inventor and Solidworks fine. Are you running XP x64?

[John Gutmann]

Nope, XP x32 I have found though that it seems that firefox kills my processor. Hmmmmm.......

-John

[Grant Cox]

Are you running the latest version of iTunes/Quicktime? One of the updates a while back screwed up all my music playing severely (scratchy and skippy), but the next update fixed it nicely.

[Schnabel]

You may have encountered some spyware or a virus through limewire.

[artdutra04]

You may have encountered some spyware or a virus through limewire.You beat me to the post by only a few minutes. ;)

I've seen quite a few people kill their computers from viruses by downloading music through Limewire. I won't install Limewire on any of my computers, unless it's a $10 beater* that I don't care about.

* I once bought a Pentium 3 computer, with a 800Mhz processor and 256Mb RAM, running Windows 2000 Professional, for $10 from a municipal government surplus auction.

[MattD]

When ever I play music in either iTunes or limewire it skips every few seconds and I don't know why I will close everything taking processor power or RAM and it still does it. Any ideas?

Thanks,
-John

I've had this happen in the past - it's actually rather common with iTunes 7. Open up the QuickTime Preferences from Control Panel and on the audio tab check the box that says Safe mode (waveOut only). You may also want to try changing some of the other options on there and see if it helps any.

[John Gutmann]

You may have encountered some spyware or a virus through limewire.

My virus scanner/spyware scanner would have caught it. It always tells me if a file is infected before it gets done
downloading.

Art, What does checking that box do?

I will try looking for updates too.

-John

[MattD]

My virus scanner/spyware scanner would have caught it. It always tells me if a file is infected before it gets done
downloading.

Art, What does checking that box do?

I will try looking for updates too.

-John

Psst, I'm not Art. :p

Checking that box tells it to playback audio using the older waveOut API instead of the newer DirectSound. DirectSound uses hardware acceleration, where all of the mixing in waveOut is done with software.

It seems to me that your audio device doesn't want to play nice with DirectSound. If updating drivers for it doesn't help, switching to waveOut could be worth a try.

[John Gutmann]

Oops I guess I looked at one named and remembered another >_< I am the worst with names.

But yea, I tried that and it works a lot better. It works fine probably 90% of the time now.

I need to try a few other things. I will post an update.

-John