Resolved Choppy audio solved

[eyoungren]

I'm putting this out there for anyone who may have or run into this issue.

Background: Playback of all audio is choppy, stuttering and drops out. This has been happening since I was using my Quicksilver.

Solution: Stop using Dashboard widgets.

Explanation: The one commonality between my Quicksilver and my G5 has been the use of the iStat Nano widget in Dashboard's developer mode. Tonight I decided to finally solve this damn annoying issue. Some research revealed that this was a problem for someone else. They tracked it down to a process called spindump. Spindump was somehow related to running Dashboard widgets.

So I killed my iStat Nano widget and choppy audio is GONE.

Been dealing with this for at least four years.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone else.

 

[DouglasCarroll]

Thats interesting, thanks for the info.

Funny thing is I love using the widgets on my powerbook G4 and i’ve never experienced any issue with stuttering audio, but I’ve neber used “i-Stat nano widget”. I wonder if thats the only culpret?

I'm putting this out there for anyone who may have or run into this issue.

Background: Playback of all audio is choppy, stuttering and drops out. This has been happening since I was using my Quicksilver.

Solution: Stop using Dashboard widgets.

Explanation: The one commonality between my Quicksilver and my G5 has been the use of the iStat Nano widget in Dashboard's developer mode. Tonight I decided to finally solve this damn annoying issue. Some research revealed that this was a problem for someone else. They tracked it down to a process called spindump. Spindump was somehow related to running Dashboard widgets.

So I killed my iStat Nano widget and choppy audio is GONE.

Been dealing with this for at least four years.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone else.

 

[eyoungren]

I wonder if thats the only culpret?

Honestly, I didn't consider that - I was so happy to solve a long standing problem.

iStat Nano performs the same functions as iStat Menus, but in a small compact widget. I was using it because there is no way to check the menubar when you're using T4Fx in full scrren mode.

The widget keeps track of data coming in and out through the network so I would suspect then that it's doing that was probably interrupting the streaming of audio (I access my music over my network). But that's just a guess. Who knows.

 

[eyoungren]

An update to this story…

Currently, I'm using my 17" PowerBook at work to stream my iTunes library. I don't use Dashboard widgets with it at all, but it's been having this issue.

Some things I've done and how they seem to correlate:

I removed the geeklet (Geektool) that was calling WiFi network info from my desktop At work I have the Mac connected via ethernet so this wasn't necessary. This worked for a while and then choppy playback started again. Generally the solution is to restart the Mac until the playback evens out. I did this like 5 times earlier this week so tried other methods.

I noticed that on reboot my Airport symbol appeared in full in my menubar for a short time when logging in. Now I have that set to off because I'm using ethernet. Annoyed, I took the icon out of the menubar and then I went and removed the following kext from System>Library>Extensions: IO80211Family.kext

I rebooted, caches updated and this problem has seemingly dissapeared. Normally, I must restart the Mac at least once before using iTunes. Now, it seems I don't have to.

Since this problem originally cropped up on my old QS and now the Quad I applied the same solution to my Quad. This completely kills WiFi of course, but I'm using ethernet on both machines.

An odd thing is that both Macs seem to login quicker now. Go figure.

I can only speculate, but for whatever reason any external WiFi activity seems to cause this choppy playback. All of my previous solutions involved things that involved some form of network access.. Both the PowerBook and the Quad have been good since I did this though. Whether that's because I tossed the baby out with the bathwater or hit the correct solution, I don't know.

Updating in case this is useful to anyone else.

 

[AphoticD]

Some research revealed that this was a problem for someone else. They tracked it down to a process called spindump. Spindump was somehow related to running Dashboard widgets.

You could also try disabling spindump entirely (Leopard or later):

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist
sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist.disabled

It may or may not have been the cause of the choppy audio, but I imagine it doesn't hurt to disable this tool as it is really only useful for developers. The tool runs when an app gets stuck in an infinite loop or race condition.

From `man spindump`:

DESCRIPTION
     spindump is a tool used by various system components to create hang
     reports and notify the user of application hangs. Most users should not
     run spindump manually, but it can be invoked by the root user with argu-
     ments similar to those for sample(1) for debugging purposes.

     Hang reports are stored at:

     /Library/Logs/HangReporter/<<application-name>>/<<hang-date>>.hang

     For normal application crashes spindump will display a dialog to alert
     the console user to the crash and offer the choice to view more details
     about the crash and/or report the crash to Apple.

@z970mp disabling spindump might be worth adding to your Leopard tuneup script.

 

[z970]

@AphoticD Noted.