Music skips when StableBit Scanner is active

[bitfidelity]

I am experiencing skipping and stuttering during playback of large, high-resolution music files (e.g., 24-bit, 192 kHz) when StableBit Scanner is running on my system. I can confirm that the culprit is StableBit Scanner, as the problem goes away once I kill "ScannerService" in Task Manager.

To be clear, this occurs even when StableBit Scanner is merely "monitoring" drives and not actively scanning them for errors.

What is the solution here, aside from uninstalling the program? An option to completely suspend its processes is one option, but that seems like a strange thing to add for an application that should continuously run to mitigate disasters.

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That's .... REALLY odd. 

My guess is that this the controller/disk that is the problem here, and that StableBit Scanner is just making it obvious. 

That said, enable the "Throttle Queries" option in StableBit Scanner's SMART settings, as that will likely help:
http://stablebit.com/Support/Scanner/2.X/Manual?Section=SMART

[Jaga]

For good measure (if Christopher's suggestion doesn't help), change to the "Throttling" tab and click the "Medium" or "High" sensitivity radio buttons, and make sure "Do not interfere with disk access" is checked.  It shouldn't matter when Scanner isn't actively scanning, but it also doesn't hurt.  Additionally Background Priority should be checked by default.

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

For some reason @bitfidelity got flagged as a spammer, automatically.

But he let me know directly that the above solution did fix the issue, which is fantastic.

 

And to let you know, StableBit Scanner queries SMART every 60 seconds, or so, by default.  Unfortunately, Windows may consider this disk activity... and keep the drives awake. 
So it appears that this activity was interfering with music playback, (likely due to how the drives handle the activity, and was causing latency)

But, throttling the queries would reduce that, and reduce the interference. 

[Jaga]

Good to hear.   

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Yup