Digital audio tracks skipping

[jclose86]

I am the technical director for a live stage theatre and use SCS for our shows. I have had to do the last several shows off cds because for reasons unknown to me the audio files on SCS keep skipping whenever I try to use the program during a show. Can anyone help me figure out how I can fix this? I greatly enjoy this system and would like to get back to using it, but not at the cost of my performances. Thank you.

[Mike Daniell]

Have a look in the Help file at 'Trouble Shooting - Fixing Stuttering or Skipping Audio' (also available online here). If that doesn't help then let me know which version of SCS you are using, what Audio Driver options you have set, and what sound card/interface you are using.

[jclose86]

I had already changed the beffering settings to 2000ms thinking that would do it. After reading that and changing the buffering to 5000ms it has been working just fine! Thank you so much! I figured I was over (or under) looking something, Thank you so much again! I have been losing my mind over this for over a month now, I am so glad to have this finally fixed!

[Mike Daniell]

Are you using the 'internal mixer'? Note that the buffer size affects the latency of fades etc when using the internal mixer but not if you are not using the internal mixer. That's why the default buffer size is much lower when using the internal mixer. The recommended solution is to not use the internal mixer (so the buffer size can be much higher without impacting on fade times).

[newlifedrama]

What kind of computer and sound card and drivers are you using? If you are using ASIO drivers, I would recommend putting all the sound files on a SD card and playing from there. Accessing the SD card is then independent of accessing the main disk drive. I had similar problems although the stuttering was very intermittent, although I could provoke it with excessive disk activity on the C: drive. Also, you can preload all the tracks into memory (except for playlists) which helps, assuming you have enough memory to hold them (I had a 4 GB laptop). Note that laptops seems to have more problems with disk latency than desktop computers.

Of course if setting the buffer size to 5000 msec works, and doesn't cause any issue that is fine. But I believe you can lower it back down the default if you use an SD card. I bought an 8 GB class 10 card for around $12 from Amazon.com.