Windows 10: Audio dropouts apparently related to ataport.sys

I have recently been experiencing problems such as audio dropouts and freezes of the ASIO transport. Latencymon has flagged ataport.sys (which Latencymon says is the "ATAPI driver extension") as having excessive DPC routine execution time. However I am confused because I thought that ATAPI was used for things such as optical drives, and I don't have any optical drives on this machine. All I have plugged into it are a hard disk, graphics card, on-board sound, on-board ethernet (no wifi), USB audio interface, some USB MIDI controllers and and a USB wireless keyboard/mouse combo.

I used not to have this problem, and I'm having trouble working out what has changed, if anything.

One thing I have been wondering is whether it matters which of the SATA sockets on the motherboard the hard disk is plugged into. I'm wondering whether I plugged it into the wrong one by mistake, because I seem to remember that it did matter which socket you used back in the days of PATA. Is there a way to test whether it is in the right socket (assuming that this is indeed an issue) without opening up the machine?—my machine is in a difficult-to-access location behind loads of other gear and it's backbreaking trying to open it up and fiddle around inside it to test things, so it's something I try to avoid if it's not strictly necessary.

EDIT: I've just had another major dropout in audio playback while latencymon was running, and this time usbport.sys appears to have been to blame. This still leaves the question of why I am having problems of this kind now, when I didn't have them before.

:)

 

N95 8GB Sound Playbback Issues

Hi all, I recently upgraded from the standard n95 to the n95 8GB.

I now find when I listen to music, either MP3's on the phone or via Internet Radio, any other activity on the phone will cause glitches, short dropouts in audio. On my first N95 the audio was rock solid with no dropouts, now even the screen light coming on
or going off causes a dropout.

Anyone having the same issue?

Cheers

Colin

 

usb audio dropouts

Hi Frank,

The concern you have encountered may be due to a corrupted file or a misconfigured setting.

In this case, we suggest to update the driver of your sound card. Generally speaking, updated drivers deliver better functionality and improved performance. For the most part, you certainly want to upgrade your drivers unless you have a very specific reason
for not wanting to do so. To perform the task, simply follow the steps provided by
Andre Da Costa on this
link.

For any other concerns, don't hesitate to get back to us.

Regards.

 

Have you installed all the drivers on your card, which system you have installed, in Device Manager shows some missing driver?

 

Yes, all the drivers are up to date. I did have the graphics card driver that was automatically installed with Windows 10. I have now installed a driver direct from Nvidia, but it has made no difference.

I have swapped the audio interface from a USB2 slot to USB3. I am no longer getting problems related to usbport.sys, but I am getting terrible delays related to DirectX and the ntoskrnl.sys.

I'm wondering whether the recently released fix for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities might have something to do with it. I can't think what else has changed about my system that might have caused this drop in performance.

 

As Fireberd and I observed on this thread: Could audio latency problem be due to Meltdown and Spectre fixes? - Windows 10 Forums, our fully-patched systems have shown no such behaviors. He's a current working sound professional, and I'm a former studio engineer, so we're both pretty sensitive to such things. It's possible that your system has experienced added latency because of these patches/updates, but we represent two other users who've not noticed this happening on our systems. I'm thinking it might be something else?
HTH,
--Ed--