Strange distortion problem (easily fixed by engine restart but very annoying)

[chaosgrid]

I have a problem since pretty much forever (Windows 10, now Windows 11) and all recent VoiceMeeter versions:

After some time, the whole audio playback stream gets distorted in a really bad way. Recently, the problem has become worse (meaning, it happens more often - not sure what the trigger is). My A1 main device is the base station of an Arctic Nova Pro Wireless but I think I've had this problem with any main sound device. I also tried to assign realtime priority to the voicemeeter.exe process but it didnt help. Simply restarting the engine fixes it.
My audio devices are using WDM and 512 samples for buffering.

I attached two samples, one being the distorted version. Note though that the recording is kinda weird, it does not sound this sped up through my speakers but the general distortion effect is similar. Maybe the way it is sped up when recording is a hint what is causing this?
It seems like at some point voicemeeter has a hiccup that causes it to speed up the playback but then hits the buffer end all the time..

[duncanpa]

Check the thread Voicemeeter and Statics, Stuttering, Crackling sound & Choppy audio

[Vincent Burel]

Posted by mkx on discord: if you use the Insert Virtual ASIO driver for connecting to Cantabile or similar, and you experience audio distortions when the window is minimized, but not when it's in focus, and you are on Windows 11, then the reason is very likely because of Windows assigning the process a lower QoS level. I played around a bit with the related API and I found that disabling PROCESS_POWER_THROTTLING_IGNORE_TIMER_RESOLUTION for the process (in my case Cantabile) solves this particular problem. From the docs:

When a process opts into enabling PROCESS_POWER_THROTTLING_IGNORE_TIMER_RESOLUTION, any current timer resolution requests made by the process will be ignored. Timers belonging to the process are no longer guaranteed to expire with higher timer resolution, which can improve power efficiency. After explicitly disabling PROCESS_POWER_THROTTLING_IGNORE_TIMER_RESOLUTION, the system remembers and honors any previous timer resolution request by the process. By default in Windows 11 if a window owning process becomes fully occluded, minimized, or otherwise non-visible to the end user, and non-audible, Windows may automatically ignore the timer resolution request and thus does not guarantee a higher resolution than the default system resolution.


It seems that you can also toggle this flag using the powercfg tool:

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path <path_to_exe>