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Topic: Playback has unsteady rhythm? (Read 2327 times) previous topic - next topic

Playback has unsteady rhythm?

For some reason, the playback on my computer runs with an uneven rhythm.  I have checked it against an electronic metronome, and have found that NWC gets a little ahead for a bar or two, then gets back in sync with the metronome.  It is quite obvious.  MIDI files created with NWC on other computers run fine on mine.  My own MIDI files have the same unsteady rhythm as I hear during playback, while composing.  I have tried shutting down all programs running in the background, but it still doesn't help. Even rebooted my machine.  (windows XP, lots of ram and speed)
Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Scott Donaldson

Re: Playback has unsteady rhythm?

Reply #1 –
This probably means that a background process is messing up the timing of multimedia applications on your PC. You might be able to improve things slightly in NWC by turning off the note chase in Tools | Options. However, since you say MIDI files also have this problem, you will have better results if you track down the root cause of the problem.

Re: Playback has unsteady rhythm?

Reply #2 –
This might help a bit in tracking down the cause:

While playing the file, press Ctrl+Alt+Del and, on the Processes tab, look at the CPU rating. If you see a process with a higher rating, it means it might be disturbing MIDI playback.
Though if you have closed other programs, as you said, there are hardly any.

The cause can be also just some system activity causing disturbances. All in all, these disturbances can occur quite easily - even scrolling an Explorer window can slow down your playback (At least on my computer it does, and there is no lack of MHz's, I ensure.)
 

Re: Playback has unsteady rhythm?

Reply #3 –
If your computer has a Pentium 4 processor, then this might have something to do with the "normalization" of sound. Under certain circumstances (I'm not enought of a computer guru to know), when the processor sees silence, it automatically switches to high-precision calculation mode even though it's not necessary. That takes up a lot of computer resources, even on fast computers. It has nothing to do with NWC.

But actually, this doesn't sound like your circumstances. I just thought I'd mention it.