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so yeah, more trouble with my xonar dx.

for the past couple of days, mp3 playback would occasionally freeze. i'll be listening to a song and it will stop for a few seconds, before continuing. Guild Wars has been "half crashing" to desktop occasionally also, as in it would still be running, but will have the "Guild Wars has encountered an error and must terminate" window, which would pull it to desktop every few seconds. i suspect the two are related, because when my game crash, it will have looping audio that persists until i restart my computer.

would this be a driver issue, or is the card simply dying? i'm using the driver from Asus's website for windows 7.

thanks in advance.

moriz wrote:

i suspect the two are related, because when my game crash, it will have looping audio that persists until i restart my computer.

It's possible but not necessarily linked. When your PC bluescreens or a game crashes, audio may be left in the (IIRC) DMA buffer and that's why it loops. Might not be directly related to the soundcard.

Might even be an unstable CPU or RAM. Should be the first thing to check.

does unstable cpu and RAM also cause mp3 playback to lag like that also?

moriz wrote:

does unstable cpu and RAM also cause mp3 playback to lag like that also?

You can't rule out anything in the realm of computers.

When you notice the persistent "looping audio", do you make sure that the game process does in fact end?

Meadows wrote:

moriz wrote:

does unstable cpu and RAM also cause mp3 playback to lag like that also?

You can't rule out anything in the realm of computers.

When you notice the persistent "looping audio", do you make sure that the game process does in fact end?

yes, i made sure the game actually did end, and the sound loop (which plays the last sound before the crash happened) continued.

IF you're on XP, do a search for Half Life 2 looping crash.

Actually, here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=half+lif ... =firefox-a

I know it says Half Life, but bear with me... I was having weird looping and freezing crashes on HL2, and it happened in Guild Wars also. I did the Paged Pool thingy and fixed it for good. I was also using an Audigy 2 at the time, but this problem seems to be sound card agnostic. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything.

If you're using Vista, I do not know if this applies or not. But it definitely made the issue go away on my XP box.

A while back when my computer had an Nvida 6600 and an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 in it, the video drivers were what caused the audio to loop and then lock the system. The next video driver update fixed the problem. Strange, but true.

Also, the chipset didn't play nicely with the same audio card -- Snap, Crackle and Pop were at every party. A different chipset fixed that problem, and I've had no trouble with the audio card since. (Strangely enough, I didn't have that issue when I ran Linux on it, so maybe it was the chipset drivers that caused the snap, crackle and pop.)

I have a Xonar D2 and I'm using windows 7 64-bit build 7100. I've actually experienced some odd things with sound and games. Sometimes when using various media players too. I think maybe Asus just needs to update there drivers a little bit for the sound cards.

alrighty, i've updated my driver to a modified xonar essence stx driver. it seems to have fixed the crashing game issue... well, it hasn't crashed yet. i still got the pausing mp3 playback problem though.

all this, combined with the trouble i'm getting with fallout 3, makes me want to ditch the card until windows 7 retail comes out. eck.

took out my xonar dx this morning and went back to the onboard realtek. unfortunately, there's now a faint white noise whenever my headset is turned on. what's even more strange, is that if i turn off my headset, it will function as a RADIO for about 2 seconds before the sound cut off. wierd.

and of course, EAX is completely gone, which kinda negates the whole point of getting all these equipment in the first place. grrrr.

Now this caught my interest. What is PagedPoolSize good for? The forum topic doesn't actually explain it.
I found a TechNet page describing it, but I'm not sure I grasp what it's on about. What is a "paged pool" and a "nonpaged pool"?