silvertones
re why.
yes i know it defies logic mate.
frankly these types of things can be so difficult to pin down.
thats why i suggested posting the song project somewhere so other people can
look in detail at the traks and confirm or not the behaviour on other pc's.

mebe something is mucking with the video behaviour somehow.
another process or task interrupting.
i have a question btw.
i notice in your sig is BIG MONITOR.
do you have a seperate monitor hooked up to your laptop ??
lets hone in on this video behaviour.
you mention stickyness.
does it happen at the same time point each time ??
or its just random ??

heres my own view of possible reasons.
1. as i mentioned before the sound card sending play position ,
and the system not being able to keep up.
2, the project playing back from the internal hard drive ,
and the internal drive performance affecting things.
or win interupting to do something while the project plays back
off the internal drive. ive seen this many times.
but it normally occurs at high trak counts with high bit depths
n sampling rates.

or it might just be something funky n difficult to
hone in on.

could you please do a test useing powertraks.,
cos i'm really curious.
start with a blank project.
then record track after track useing the internal drive.
just record blank traks. or make up some ruff song idea.
tell me if you get the same sticky problem , and if you do..
tell me the track count where the sticky video problem starts occurring.
this might give clues as to your internal drive performance.
have you ever done a performance test on your internal hard drive ??
there are various drive utilities around to check on drive performance/thruput.
ie just keep it simple initially before moving on to other tests.
it might purely be internal hard drive performance.
as i said before , some internal hard drives have a problem keeping up.
so i suspect in the daw software itself, the way the daw is coded,
is to ensure at all costs the audio carries on playing back
sacrificing video performance.
ive seen such stickyness in various daw/pc combos.
but it normally occurs at higher trak counts.
for example an old pc i have here exhibits such,cos it has a crummy hard drive...
but the modern dual core desktop doesnt.
there is only so much developers can do in source code of course.
please run that powertraks test i suggested.
it should only take half an hour.

retired puter engr....powertracks on amd......NICE !
"what is the black art of audio engineering ?"
my silly songs...motagator.com/bmanning
see my tips in the tips section.