Help / Troubleshooting

Playback stutters, drops out or skips

The music breaks up: short gaps, a stumble every few seconds, or a fade to silence and back. Almost always the audio is simply not reaching the output fast enough.

What a stutter actually is

Vesari Stylus reads ahead of what you hear: about a quarter of a second before the first sound, and roughly two seconds in hand from then on. A shorter interruption is absorbed. A longer one empties the buffer, and the output fades to silence over a couple of milliseconds rather than splicing in a hard zero, then fades back when audio returns. That fade, repeated, is what a stutter sounds like.

So: what stopped the reading? Work through these in order of likelihood.

1. A slow or sleeping drive

A mechanical disk that has spun down takes seconds to come back, and an external USB drive can too. The signature is a stutter on the first track after an idle spell, with later tracks clean. Copy an album to your internal drive and play it there; if that is clean, you have your answer. In the track list, the format column badges anything off internal storage: Stored on a USB / removable drive or Stored on a network share (NAS/SMB).

Rule out the file too: a damaged one breaks up in every player. See A track won't play or is flagged damaged.

2. A network share

A share stalls for longer than a local drive and more often: Wi-Fi congestion, a NAS that spins its disks down, a share that has to re-authenticate. The signature is that only the globe-badged tracks stutter. Try a wired connection, stop the NAS sleeping, and test with a local copy. Using a NAS or network share as your library covers the rest.

3. Something else competing

For the disk. A library scan, a ReplayGain scan or a CD rip reads hard from your drives; let one finish first.

For the processor. Resampling costs CPU, and it runs only when a file's sample rate differs from your output device's. If those are the only files that break up, set Resampler quality under Settings → Playback → Audio Output to Fast (default) rather than High (sinc, more CPU).

For the output device. In WASAPI Exclusive the device is locked to Vesari Stylus while a track plays, and the reverse holds too: if a meeting or calling app took it exclusively first, Vesari Stylus falls back to Shared for that track and says so in a toast. Close that app and try again. See No other app can play sound while Vesari Stylus is open.

4. Exclusive output timing

Exclusive output is a Lifetime feature. On other tiers the setting is ignored and playback runs in Shared, so this section applies only if you have it.

Set Output mode to Shared (Windows mixer) and play the same track. If Shared is clean and Exclusive is not, the exclusive path is your problem.

Exclusive asks your driver for its smallest buffer period, and there is no buffer-size setting anywhere in the app, so a driver that cannot hold that timing on a busy machine stutters where Shared would not.

A driver that clocks a stream at the wrong speed plays slow and smeared. The app measures the device's real consumption rate over roughly the first second and a half and, after two bad readings, hands the track to Shared and remembers that device as shared-only. After a driver update, Device compatibility overrides in the same group has a Reset overrides button; exclusive is tried again on the next playback start.
A device that stops asking for audio for about five seconds, or refuses a write after the endpoint is torn away, also hands the track to Shared where it had reached: a short break rather than silence.

Exclusive output connects but sounds silent, garbled or lopsided covers both.

5. Power settings

Windows power saving sits behind several causes above: a disk timeout parks the drive, USB selective suspend idles a USB DAC, and a power transition tears the endpoint away. Keep the PC and its disks awake while you listen, and turn USB selective suspend off.

Gaps that are not stutter

A gap between tracks in exclusive output. Exclusive locks one hardware format for the life of the stream. Tracks chain with no break while the next file's native sample rate and channel count match the one playing (bit depth does not matter); a change in either reopens the device, and you hear a gap there. See Gapless, ReplayGain & CUE sheets.
A surround track that is slow to start. A one-off cost: The first DTS or AC-3 track after launch takes several seconds.

Before you report it

Settings → Logs shows the Application Logs. Filter to Audio and search for underrun: the engine writes a line each time the output runs dry. Ones clustered at the start of tracks point at the drive; ones spread through a track at the network or the device. See Reading the logs.

Then use Settings → Support → Report a Bug, which bundles your recent logs. Say where the files live, which output mode you were in, and whether Shared and other players are clean on the same track. See How to report a bug.

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