Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7

When you are using your PC as part of a home theatre audio glitches can really drive you mad, your watching a movie and its getting to the interesting bit just as Windows 7 stutters over the audio ruining the moment. Microsoft have a detailed post on how they have improved Windows 7 to avoid audio issues like that, I have found that laptops seem to suffer from it more than desktop systems and have never been able to pin it down to a single issue.

The post details what can cause the issues, who is experiencing it and what they are doing to resolve the issue in Windows 7

What Causes Glitching?

In previous posts, we’ve touched on a variety of ecosystem initiatives and challenges that we’ve undertaken for Windows 7, including application compatibility, accessibility, and system performance, among others. Tracing the root cause of audio glitching leads us to a similar place: because Windows runs on a huge variety of hardware configurations and multitasks between dozens of applications, it is challenging to ensure that all of the programs and drivers running on your computer will work together in exactly the way you expect.

Audio is especially sensitive. In order for you to hear music from your speakers, data needs to be delivered to your audio hardware approximately every 10 milliseconds, or 30 times in the blink of an eye! The challenge is that your PC is usually doing a lot of other things at the same time you’re listening to music, such as streaming that YouTube video or downloading that new song, and many of these other tasks have complex timing requirements as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much – a slow network driver or a graphics driver that requires plenty of CPU time – to prevent your audio from reaching your ears in a continuous fashion.