Music stutters and loops a few seconds before continuing

[AugustHouse]

Hi all, just recently got a new computer a few days ago, and I copied all my player and library settings over to the new system (running the latest version of MusicBee).

The library and player settings copied over just fine, but I am now experiencing a very annoying glitch with music playback. After around a minute of playback, the track will stutter and start looping the last ~0.5 seconds about 3-4 times before continuing with playback. I haven't been able to find a consistent way to reproduce this, but it happens probably 80% of the time (i.e. 20% of playback will have no problems).

I have tried playing the tracks in question on Windows Media Player and they all played fine, so the music files themselves don't seem to have anything wrong with them. Any help would be appreciated.

[AugustHouse]

Sorry for the double post, but I've tried a few other things out to see if I can find a more reproducible case. It turns out that this issue is happening even with a freshly installed MusicBee (with all prior settings deleted and an empty library, testing with a working .mp3 file). So the issue does not seem to be within my library settings, but with the application itself or its interactions with my computer. Has anyone had a similar experience?

[Steven]

it sounds like your drive is sleeping and the stutter is while it spins up again

[AugustHouse]

Is there a fix to this? I've since tried a few other music players to see if this is happening with them, but Windows Media Player, Foobar2000 and WinAmp are all working fine with the same music files.

[Steven]

i wont be able to help with this

[Adson]

... I had a similar problem with one of my drives. I could solve it with the help of a little tool named "MDIS" = My Drive Is Spinning.

This tool writes a few bytes of data to the "sleeping" drive every 2 minutes. Becaus of that the drive will not go into standby mode and ... keeps spinning :-)

Your problems should be gone with MDIS.

[Keitou]

I also have the same problem and I tried the disk fix with various programs, MDIS and NoSleepHD. I also set the drive to never be inactive in change advanced power settings. None of them worked for me and musicbee is still stuttering. But I noticed for some reason MusicBee's disk usage goes up in task manager once it starts looping. It goes up above 15%. Once the looping stops, the usage goes back down. Really strange indeed... This starts happening after maybe around 30 mins of playback. From that point on, it stutters at random times.

[AugustHouse]

I will give those applications a try and report back. Is it a drive issue if it's only affecting MusicBee though? I'm by no means an expert, but wouldn't a drive issue affect all music players on the system?

[AugustHouse]

Tentatively solved the issue. I didn't test MDIS for very long, but it worked for the 2-3 plays I tried with it. Going off of a hunch, I then tried reinstalling my MusicBee onto my D drive (HDD), where my music library files are located. Previously, I had the application itself on my C drive (SSD). This seems to have solved the issue; does that make sense to any of you?

[Steven]

are you using a portable install of musicbee? if not then i dont see what difference it would make where MB is installled. It still sounds like the issue was a sleeping disc

[AugustHouse]

My guess is that my D drive wasn't constantly in use when MusicBee was on my C drive, so now that MusicBee is on the D drive (i.e. the same drive as my library), the disk is now being spun by the application?

[AugustHouse]

Just got back from vacation without my laptop. Unfortunately, it seems I was just incredibly lucky with my previous listening session; the issue still remains. Even with MDIS running, the stuttering is still happening, but now at random intervals instead of at the first ~third of the track. Anyone have any other ideas to try?

[Steven]

sometimes security software can do crappy things to an application (Avast has been reported several times as causing issues) so try whitelisting MB in your security software.
I have no other suggestions

[AugustHouse]

Doesn't look like whitelisting MusicBee in Avast did anything, unfortunately. Thanks anyway for the help though.

[Steven]

i dont know avast but its been reported several times that the "deep scan" feature is what causes the most problems