Stuttering audio at playback

Why does the audio stutter/skip when it’s playing in audacity? I reinstalled Windows, tried 10/11, it still just stutters randomly. Didn’t have this problem in previous releases. Also other programs play the audio fine.

Is it one piece of audio in particular or everything that you open?

I recently started getting the same problem. Running V3.2.1 on Win7 pro. Seems the longer it’s playing, the more quick, random skipping it does. Not just the audio but the graphics freeze momentarily as well. To test since the project with the problem had tons of tracks and sections, I saved them all off as wav files, Started a new project and imported the files into it. Same problem. Another project runs fine however. Maybe hardware overload or something or a bad track(?) I can’t figure it out. Thought sound drivers but up to date. Next test will be to reinstall 3.2.0 which didn’t have this trouble and see if the newest update is the cause. Will report back if I figure it out.

Same problem now with v3.2.0 - tried with 32 and 64 bit versions. Also tried process priority, roll back updates, reinstall anti-virus, etc. with no luck.

Went back to v2.4.2 to test which is fine. Now trying 64bit V3.1.0 and seems okay so far. Think maybe an interrupt issue? Gets worse over time when playing back a song. Gaps start coming sooner together and get longer as well.

Now I’m really lost. Since 3.1.0 worked and 3.1.1 and .2 are just bug fixes, figured I’d stick with 3.1 but use the most improved.

Started with 3.1.3 - back to stuttering. Dropped back to 3.1.2 with same problem. Next 3.1.1 nope, then 3.1.0 which worked fine yesterday… but not today with the same file.

Only one thing I noticed that may be the problem is that the last time the file worked in 3.1.0 and I saved it, it said it was compacting it? Hasn’t worked since.

If that’s it, can it be un-compacted maybe? If not, maybe a setting to use it without it compacting the files?

I love all the great features the newer versions have but damned if I’m going to upgrade to win10 to get them. It took me a decade to get the bugs worked out of win7… Please help. :cry:

Watched task manager while stuttering playback and noticed lots of “clipping” of CPU and or disk access. Saw lots of stuff I didn’t recognize being accessed so with some googling found that they were extra services from my long running anti-virus/firewall program Zone Alarm. I’d followed the cleanup and reinstall the day prior with the tech assuring me that it would help clean things up. It didn’t so uninstalled it, ran CCleaner, went back to windows firewall to be safe and still testing but even V3.1.3 seems to run ok now. I did get one stutter while holding down the mouse button for some reason but easy enough to avoid and sort of confirms resource maxing maybe?

Maybe it would help if you “whitelist” Audacity in Zone Alarm.