Realtek AC97 Sound and ASROCK M'Board

I thought I would post some issues with sound and Windows 7.I have an ASROCK Dual Sata2 MB which has AC97 on board sound. There is a recent Driver from Realtek (6305 latest version for Vista and W7). Installs fine and all seems well until you play music via Media Player from the library. At the end of each track (about 20 seconds) the music will stutter for about a second and carry on.There are quite a few posts on the net about this so it is not a unique problem. The most common fix is to disable all sound enhancements from the sound panel tabs. This works fine for some but not myself, yes the glitch is reduced but not eliminated.Additionally I have noticed that boot up takes an additional 30 secs, you have three sections at boot. The first black windows starting screen, followed by the light blue which says 'Please Wait, then the last part of the blue screen which says 'welcome'. The 30s delay is during the 'please wait'I downloaded Process Monitor to see what is causing the delay. It is the Realtek sound driver as Windows Continuously opens and closes the registry key HKLM\current machine\software\microsoft\windows\MMdevices\audio\capture hundreds of times over this 30s period. There seems to be five or six registry entries under audio capture which relate to microphone, speakers, line in etcIf the Realtek driver is uninstalled the 'Please Wait' time is about a second.I have also tried using winamp as an alternative to winndows media player, the glitch is still there but at a lower level, which points to the sound driver?As a last resort I have bought a 7.1 sound card to try and see if a different card/driver solves the problem.Any one else had a similar issue?Andy

Hello Andy - Welcome to w7forums

Could you post more about your computer?

I looked up "ASROCK" and found you could have and variation of parts.
AC97 is old tech so I am wondering how old the rest of your system may be.

One thing you might could try for a few minutes is to disable Windows Aero and see if that makes any difference.

Thanks Clifford,The system is about three years old and is one I built. Asrock Dual Sata2 mother board which has a JMicron HD controller, Uli chip for LAN port (both these were slight issues on installing Windows 7 but were OK once the updated drivers were found, JMicron for the HD and NVIDIA for the Uli). Graphics - PCI Express NVIDIA 8800GTS512, 2GB of RAM, Athlon X64 4800+ dual core processor, Samsung F1 1TB HD (new for windows 7), NEC DVD rewriter and DVD reader. Windows index score for the system is 5.1 It's working quite well apart for the sound issue. I have bought a Novatech 7.1 sound card which uses the c-media 8768 chip just to see if the problem will remain with this card and will try the open source drivers http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers

Success, no skipping at end of tracks, and no long boot up. Cost £13 or $10 well worth the small cost. Conclusion the Realtek driver is the cause of the issues.


Andy