Best settings for Mediamonkey & Win7

Last week I installed the latest version of Media Monkey on my Win 7 machine to see, if there is anything new for native playback on USB DACs, but there isn't.

Beside the (in my opinion strange Japanese ASIO Plug-In), there is no way to get a Bit Perfect Out out of Media Monkey for native USB DAC playback, nor auto sample rate change.

The kind of settings in Media Monkey running on Win 7 is nearly the same as running on Vista and is nearly the same as in the former 3.x versions of Media Monkey.

Under Win 7 (or Vista) and native Playback via an USB DAC, I would stick to an app, that supports exclusive WASAPI mode. This would be Bit True and auto sample rate change.

Juergen

Hi Dan - Fairly soon there will be a promotion going on between HDtracks and MediaMonkey involving some downloads and a nice PDF booklet. In this booklet I wrote a little MediaMonkey configuration "guide." I think it will be released fairly soon.

Sounds good Chris, I will watch out for that, cheers!

Really looking for some advice on this. I've recently installed the Weiss DAC2 into my system. Windows 7 recognised the device and installed the drivers no problems.

However, in Mediamonkey, when I play back tracks they "skip" a bit like a CD can do. This happens using the directsound, waveOut and ASIO output (Otachan ASIO ver. 0.67) options. The skipping seems to be worse with the ASIO. This happens with normal-res and high-res files. With some of the settings, when I play high-res files, although the DAC seems to switch modes, I get odd bursts of funny noise over the music, as well as the skipping effect.

As an experiment, I tried playing back the high-res files through Foobar with the kernel streaming plugin. This sounded amazing, though there were still (very small) skips/glitches every approximately 80-100 seconds.

I'd really appreciate any help on this, Chris or any other readers.

Thanks!!

Check your cpu load while playing as well as memory usage.

There are ways to optimize Windows for audio playback, but you may not want to employ them on a machine that you use for something other than audio.

If your W7 machine is just for audio I suggest you visit Blackvipers web site and reduce your services as well as the normal resource hogging applications like transparency etc. Finally go to Device manager and disable un-needed devices like the un-used network adapter etc. Check and disable services that run on a timer via task scheduler and get rid of the page file.

I do all the above plus a bit more for my Firewire DAC, no glitches no hiccups and great sound with a fully optimized OS.

Good Luck

I just installed my Minerva with Vista and have 7 comming next week. Have you tried the settings in the Weiss control panel. It has a setting on the first page with a few different modes. Try them each and see if one solves the issue. Daniel told us that ours (just a week or two old has the 7 driver so I assume a different drive exists! Also, I think I would stick with ASIO and WASAPI. Let us know how it comes along!

Regards

Jesus R
www.sonore.us

PS what does your dealer say?

Thanks for the replies so far.

I have tried the Japanese ASIO plugin with Mediamonkey. This one seems to skip the worst! I have mucked about with the settings for this but can't seem to get rid of the problem.

CPU usage constantly fluctuates during playback from around 10% to around 80%. Memory usage stays stable at 575MB. I just noticed, the CPU usage does this even when there is no playback. When I shut down MM, the CPU usage flucuates between 10-45%. I have just noticed that this CPU usage only occurs when the Weiss DAC2 driver is enabled, or when the Weiss DAC2 is plugged in via the firewire cable! I have posted some more information about this in a separate specific thread, in the hope of getting some answers (http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Problem-Weiss-DAC2-driver).

Thanks

Hi Chris,
I've been watching for the MM/HDtracks promotion mentioned by you in your late November post, but haven't seen it. Any possibility of getting a sneak peak at your configuration guide?

Let me see what's up with that. I finished my part of the document long ago :~)

Yeah this would be useful, to have your thoughts on this particular topic! :)))

any luck with HDTracks?

It avalable with the Free download of there sampler.

Try this link http://www.mediamonkey.com/welcome.htm?l=en

Interesting document, thanks!!

But you appear to have split allegiance to Mediamonkey and J-River !!

Regards

Dan

I use MM on my XP laptop using the M2Tech Hi-Face and the Kernal Streaming Plugin (Steve Monk) and that is really great into my Audio Note Dac. With Windows 7, you should use Wasapi.