Have 2019 BIAB installed with current build 634 on ASUS I5 laptop 8GB memory,500GB hard drive with Windows 10. This laptop is only used for BIAB and I use a BOSE L1 with a ToneMatch Audio Engine Mixer(Which acts a my output driver). I never had this stopping problem with Windows 7 and only until I upgraded to Windows 10 did problem begin. The problem also occurs when I use laptop in standalone not hooked to BOSE system. I have tried selective startup, disabled Anti-virus program, adjusted virtual memory, adjusted for best performance, cleaned and de fragmented hard drive, turned off everything I could think of in Windows 10, all drivers are up to date and songs still stopped intermittently and its rarely the same song. I have also adjusted Real Tracks generation settings to see if it makes a different and it didn't. This happens using MME audio setting only where songs intermittently stop/stutter, however the cursor within the bar always tracks perfectly. I can bypass issue by selecting WAS audio setting, however when I do this the cursor within the bar will lag or stop intermittently and sometimes catch up before end of song. With WAS at least the music does not stop or stutter just bar cursor does not track correctly all the time. Looking for any suggestions to fix problem! Thanks

Thom,

Next time you play a song in which problems have occurred, before generating, right-click on the chordsheet, select "Song Settings" and then select "This song has playback problems, disable fast generation" and see if that helps.

Also, is your laptop's video driver up to date? Video drivers have sometimes caused display errors like you describe.

Have you checked your hard drive for fragmentation? A seriously fragmented drive can slow things down.

Lastly, in your antivirus software (and Windows Defender if it's running), I suggest excluding the \bb and \Realband folders.

Regards,
Noel

Noel,

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll try them. All drivers are current and the hard drive was de fragmented. I use BIAB for live performances and I never know which song it will happen in. Sometimes a song works fine and other times it has problems. I'll try disabling fasr generation all the time. Also, I'll try setting you recommend for antivirus program. Its amazing never had an issue until I migrated to Windows 10 this year since Windows 7 was going unsupported.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Thom

In general, Windows 10 takes fewer resources than 7.

One thing you might look at is to download and run the free utility, DPC Latency Checker. Directions are on the web page. It says it isn't updated for Windows 8 and 10 but it works fine; just expect about 1000 as the new lowest reading. Because your problems happen at random on different songs, I would rule out a background process cutting in.

In general, Windows 10 takes fewer resources than 7.

One thing you might look at is to download and run the free utility, DPC Latency Checker. Directions are on the web page. It says it isn't updated for Windows 8 and 10 but it works fine; just expect about 1000 as the new lowest reading. Because your problems happen at random on different songs, I recommend that you first rule out a background process cutting in.

Thom,

This could be an internet thing, too.

For example, if your computer is hooked up to an internet connection and downloading (and then installing) an update in the background, this can impact on BIAB because BIAB requires a fair bit of computer power.

Try disabling your network connection -- especially when you are playing live.

Regards,
Noel

I would try the suggestions already posted first, and would add one more thing. It's closely related to the DPC latency checker tool, and the disk fragmentation which are both about performance. So if you're issue is performance/resource related this process will work. I do a lot of computer performance troubleshooting at work, so I'll list out the top level steps. The only time I've had BIAB intermittently cut out on my PC during playback was when the CPU was pegged at 100% or near it and BIAB was competing with other processes.

> Get BIAB ready to repro the problem
> Open Task Manager
> Select the Performance tab in Task Manager so you can see the CPU, memory and other graphs.
> Do whatever you need to repro the issue. As soon as you see it, switch very quickly back to Task Manager.
> Watch the CPU and disk graphs for spikes. If you see them hitting 100%, then you can dig a bit deeper to find the culprit.
> To dig into the next level, click Open Resource Monitor near the bottom of the Task Manager window.
> In the Resource Monitor window you can stay in the Overview tab. Then click on the CPU column (just to the right of Threads) to sort descending and try to repro it again. If it's a CPU contention issue you should see which process is hogging the CPU.
> If it's a disk related contention/performance issue you can click on the Disk tab and then try sorting by Total (B/Sec). Generally, the process with the most disk utilization will be hogging the disk bandwidth, but not always. If you look on the right pane at the Disk Queue Length you should see it fluctuation in the range of 0-2, ideally. Anything in double digits sustained for many seconds indicate the disk is straining.

You can even go deeper than this with the Perfmon tool which can log the performance to a file over minutes or hours and this can then be analyzed to determine the overall performance of the computer and its processes in detail, but that's generally only needed when you have very intermittent slowness which makes it hard to catch in the Task Manager screen.

The other possibility is the antivirus software, which was already mentioned, and oddly this may not be detected by the steps above. Same thing for systems that have driver issues, OS corruption or any sort of malware. The performance can be impacted in ways in those cases that just don't show up in the basic tools. But generally when that happens you'll see the lags and slowness across multiple programs, not just one in particular.

The only time my music starts to stutter and sometimes has short stops is when my audio interface buffers are set low. I can set them low when I record, but sometimes I have to increase them when I am playing my song back. Like you this happens intermittently, but I think that I have narrowed it down to either the number of tracks that I have and/or the number of plug-ins I have running. You might want to check your audio interface buffers.

Hey there, ThomG.

Something I've learned with Windows 10, which is most common with laptops, is that if you go to Power & Sleep settings | Additional Power Settings | Change Plan Settings (for your selected plan) | Change Advanced Power Settings, and then go down to Processor Power Management and hit the "+" symbol next to it on the left, you'll see a minimum processor state. For a lot of laptops and Windows 10 computers, this is set to 5%. If you increase it to 100%, this can potentially help any unexplainable stuttering you're having.

If that doesn't work, I'd suggest shooting an e-mail to support@pgmusic.com where our tech support team would be happy to help!

How to get there exactly can sometimes vary, especially if you have a fixed power plan on your computer, but that should roughly get you there.

Noel,

When performing I always run in airplane mode disconected from internet.

Thanks Thom

That sounds like audio interface issues with buffers, latency settings and drivers being used. It is a typical symptom.

Since I have no idea what the Bose thing is or does, I won't point at it as the problem...... but I will say, dig into that device and be sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. I'm not a fan of multi-function devices that also "do interface" work as well as other stuff......I would suspect it first.....

@Ember has an excellent suggestion there for anyone who runs BIAB from a laptop or portable device. I've seen the same problems with servers at my company - we turn off all power management features because it will interfere with certain latency-sensitive applications.

If you wanted to take it a step further, you could disable all CPU power saving features to see if that improves things, but that tends to vary a bit with the hardware you have, and involves going into a number of different places to fully turn it off (as referenced by others). But, you probably want it to remain on most of the time when you're not using BIAB. I would recommend that you run it with AC power plugged in when using BIAB because the CPU power saving will kick in a lot more when running in battery.

Hopefully between the various suggestions you have here and other things you might fine, you'll find something that helps. It might me a matter of trying multiple tweaks of small improvements until you either get it to work the way you want or you decide that you've expended enough effort and call it good.

One question, why are you running Biab live on a gig, what do you get out of that vs rendering your songs to wav or Mp3's and then using an app like Gig Performer to manage your set list, display lyrics or chord charts and play the song files?

Bob