[wdmaudiodev] Audio Encoding Hang

  • From: Darwin Sanoy <darwin.nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wdmaudiodev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 11:15:14 -0400

I am hoping someone here can help me figure this out.

I teach live online courses.

I am using Windows 7.

Over the course of one week I used two completely different web conferencing
solutions and both had what seem to be audio encoding issues on my system.
 I can tell this because it affected all participants simultaneously and
also did not affect or seem to be related to any activities on my system
that affected video encoding.  It also does not affect me hearing them speak
immediately.  My system also remains responsive - so it does not appear to
be a process level event - but perhaps a thread level event.

One system is completely proprietary interfacing with Windows audio directly
(Webtrain) and the other is Java based (Elluminate).  I have contacted the
support of these companies and they are unable to resolve the issue or point
me in the right direction.

The delay/hang events would occur about 5 times in 5-6 hours of being
connected - with about 50% of that time with me speaking.

They are anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute of total silence followed by a
catch up of the audio on client machines.

Here are some symptoms and attributes of my system:

In the Windows Event log I have several audio warnings for those days, but
NOT a 1 to 1 correlation to the problem periods.  It is "Windows Audio
Device Graph glitch threshold count exceeded" (Source:
Microsoft-Windows-Audio Event ID: 18, dwAudioDgTerminationCode 429)
 Googling this yields nothing.

I have done some research (and hope I am not poisoning the well with it):

1) On my system the "Andrea Audio Enhancements Service" is enabled which is
known to cause system boot up hangs.  However the problem manifested when I
had this panel in the microphone disabled (but service remaining enabled
because I didn't know it had an associated service) - and it is not a
general system hang as described by most of the problems with this service.

2) This is a laptop and the audio driver loads "smax4pnp.exe" which seems
like something I could disable.

3) I have used InstalledCodecs from nirsoft to identify that I have two
non-Microsoft audio codecs installed. (Fraunhoffer and Lame)

My gut tells me to disable all three above items to make things cleaner -
but I also don't want to go through another week of hangs while delivering
to customers if these things would not be related to the problem in any way.

Does anyone know what the culprit most likely is?

Does anyone know how (or If) I can trace this with Process Monitor
(procmon/exe) or Process Explorer (procexp.exe) ?

Thanks for any help,
Darwin
http://CSI-Windows.com

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