Awful glitching sound on playback

• Jul 9, 2015 - 03:55

So Musescore is one of the first programs I downloaded onto my new Toshiba laptop. And I'm having major problems. During playback, at random parts of the piece, the audio will "crash" and slow down majorly .and make a glitching sound (kind of like a super super reverb). Generally it only lasts for a few measures and then returns to normal, but it happens very frequently. Usually if I stop the playback and restart back at the very beginning of a messed up part, it will play normally (although going back a measure or 2 before usually results in the section messing up again.) For the metaphorically minded it's like wading through water and suddenly finding yourself in thick tar that burns your legs (or eardrums). Sometimes exiting out of the program and going back in will make it work too, but that usually just changes up which parts will mess up. I've mostly been working with the attached score, but I've also had the problem show up with my other scores.

Any help? I saw something I thought was similar that mentioned changing the reverb in the mixer around, although that didn't really help. I'm running Windows 8. I hope it's not a problem with my laptop.

Starting at measure 193 gets you headed to a very rough and painful patch for the playback.

Attachment Size
Sonata_no_2.mscz 50.83 KB

Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I've turned my computer off and on. I haven't tried resetting to the factory settings yet (although there isn't much risk there- I just put the program on this laptop a few days ago).

I think that's a last resort. Maybe I need to do that soon?

I'll restart my computer again.

Edit: And... nothing.

In reply to by Miller4h9.

What is your soundcard?

FWIW I had problems with audio glitching with MuseScore 2.0

Every time the guitar part hit a 6 note chord it slowed and glitched. I never got to the bottom of it and it suddenly and mysteriously disappeared never to return.

What you describe sounds like a buffering issue, maybe your audio drivers don't like FluidSynth for some reason.

One thing to try - check the sample rate of your audio output - if there is a discrepancy between MuseScore's output sample rate and your Computer's audio output ot would sound the way you're describing.

In fact I rolled back a driver update a couple of months ago because I could no longer set the soundcard audio sample rate to 44.1k which was causing problems with JACK.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

I don't computers but does Realtek HD Audio have anything to do with my soundcard? Probably not.

How could I do some of these things you're mentioning?

Edit: One thing I have noticed is that when using the playback feature, opening the Task Manager shows that the Speed of my computer is going over the Maximum Speed (like, 2.84 GHz when the max is 2.20 GHz). It usually drops quickly after it starts buffering, and then it continues buffering even though the speed is much lower. This could be the problem though.

In reply to by Miller4h9.

Yup - Realtek HD Audio is your soundcard.

MuseScore has had difficulties with versions of the Realtek drivers in the past - see the Known Incompatibilities section of the handbook for more details.

The fact that your CPU is maxing out at the beginning of playback doesn't bode well.

How much RAM do you have?

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

8GB of memory- not shabby.

I'll check out the manual.

Our other computer had an IDT HD Audio CODEC for the soundcard. At least that's what it looks like.

I just checked it out- removing the pedals gets rid of the effect (I think). This isn't a preferred solution, but it is a solution nonetheless.

I'm facing the same problem - but for me, it applies whenever i just have too many notes at a time - something like a trill over a larger chord or just a tremolo on one note, or even if I'm unlucky, simply just having a lot going on in the score causes this glitchyness. It's really annoying, but I don't know what I can do about it. While it never applies when I export as an mp3, it's really annoying. Are there any more solutions to this?

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