Computer hangs for a second when new song starts

[VortexV]

Hi,

I'm running Winamp v.5.61 (x86) on Windows 7 (x64).

I've read the FAQ and searched the internet extensively but I cannot fix the following problem:
Since a few months my computer freezes/hangs/falters (I don't know a good word to describe it) for about 2 seconds when a new song plays. Everything, even the cursor, moves very shocky. And if I accidentally play a flac album (won't play those anymore either) it switches from song to song quickly, so I have to reboot my computer because it takes about 5 minutes to get winamp to shut down otherwise. Windows media player doesn't have problem playing songs.

I've tried the following things so far:
Remove Winamp and firefox 4 (I had read someone had solved the problem that way) and reinstalled it. No sollution
Removed Winamp completely with all user settings and plugins (That was a painful thing to do), reinstalled it. No sollution
Reinstalled my audio driver (the problem seemed to have started when I installed the official one instead of the windows audio driver, not sure though)

Driver software:
VIA (Vinyl) HD Audio Deck
Package version: 8.3.00.31, Codec version: VT1708S, Driver Version: 6.0.1.8300
Direct X version: 11

Possibly related software:
ASIO4all
FL studio
Synthesia
Ableton Live
E-mu X-midi 1x1 (software for the thing that connects my piano to my pc)

If you don't know the solution, could you at least give my some good google keywords to search on, I'm freaking desperate.....

[VortexV]

No one? Do you need more information? Is no one else experiencing this problem?

[MrSinatra]

its probably a plugin. post your onefornunz list. (search the forums for it)

[VortexV]

I can offer some additional information. If it tries to play a song (from the library) that isn't there anymore, it still hangs. Also the effect is cumulative, if it's two successive songs that don't play it takes my computer about 20 seconds to regain contentiousness, 3 songs over a minute.

I've added the One for Nunz list you wanted.

Thanks in advance!

[MrSinatra]

the only thing that jumps out at me is the audioscrobbler, try winamp without that. otherwise, hopefully Koopa or DrO can shed some light...

[DrO]

a consistent time out like what is being seen would point to maybe trying to play media from a remote / shared drive which is the only thing i can think off which could be the cause. so a bit more information possibly about the filepaths experiencing the issue may help to see if that idea might be the case.

otherwise the audioscrobbler plug-in would need to be renamed from .dll to .off and also seeing if the issue still happens when not using the german language pack.

-daz

[VortexV]

I've deïnstalled the audioscrobbler .dll. My language pack is Dutch, I couldn't find where to change it, but it seems like if either were the cause, the problem would be far more common. I play the music directly from the c:\ disk, which consists of 2 1TB disks in RAID 0 and is recently defragmented.

In the recent past I did have some trouble playing .flac files with winamp (which it was supposed to play without addition) so I installed a third party plugin to play em. That did work, except it wouldn't scrobble the .flac songs. But that cause should be excluded because of the total reïnstall of winamp, right? .flac files play fine now, btw.

Other than that my computer is pretty new and fast and hardly ever has any problems, let alone related one's.

For completeness I have also added the new One for Nuns list.

Edit: This didn't solve the problem.
BTW: I subscribed to the thread, so from now on I'll respond a bit quicker.

[DrO]

nothing obvious jumps out. one thing that does come to mind from something i experienced yesterday, do you have album art in the files and if so is it reasonable large? i.e. over 500x500 sort of sizes - as that can cause Winamp to hang especially if you're using the Bento skin which will try to lookup the album art from files.

-daz

[MrSinatra]

i would also do a clean install, b/c i never needed any 3rd party stuff to do flac. i'm worried remnants of that may be there.

i don't know the link, but the forum/site has clear explanations for clean installs.

[DrO]

there's no need to do a clean install at the moment as that's already been done (as per info in the first post) and most likely, flac didn't work before either from not having chosen it in the installer or some general funkyness (most likely the older official flac plug-in which then became the one shipped with Winamp was used).

-daz

[MrSinatra]

i saw that, but i was just concerned that some non-winamp items might remain. seems odd regardless, i wonder if the flacs themselves are weird, or maybe the HD is set to sleep very quickly?

maybe try winamp lite instead, and also i wonder what the ASIO does he has...?

[DrO]

i've looked at the plug-ins list and that would have caught any random dlls which may be present and there weren't that i saw.

directsound is the active output plug-in so asio won't have any bearing on things (especially as that would require an out_asio plug-in to be present and used which isn't the case).

you may have a point about the hard drive shutting down too soon though my gut is going with it being some else like the type of drive (possibly external / networked) which is causing the delay / pause in conjunction with a driver issue - as Winamp itself shouldn't be causing the whole machine to hang and points more at something else which it just happens to be triggering.

-daz

[VortexV]

Just to be clear it happens at every song, even if the song isn't there (i.e. a file in the playlist that has been deleted or moved) and WMP does not have this problem.
I did have a really hard time getting ASIO to work for FL Studio, and I did try installing various audio drivers. So if you can't find any problem with Winamp, then it's probably driver related. I'll see what I can do about that.

Thanks for your help so far.

[DrO]

can you provide an example of one of the file paths since if it's locking up when the file is dead then that makes me think of a network drive which is known to take an age to respond in some device setups.

-daz

[VortexV]

There is no network drive. This is the song i'm currently listening (it's awesome):
C:\Muziek\Albums\Gramatik_Discography_(2008-2010)\Gramatik - Street Bangerz Volume 2 (2009)\11-gramatik--orchestrated_incident_(original_mix)-dh.mp3

This is where Winamp is located:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Winamp\winamp.exe