Delay when playing soundfiles

Question

I have a problem playing soundfiles in Windows 7 (have tried WMP and also from my system I coded).

Often (not all the time) I get a delay before the sound file starts to play (from a couple of seconds to maybe 30 seconds). This only happens the first time I try to play the file. The second time there is no delay.

I got a tips from the guy who built the sound module I use in my program (he could see from the log file) that the delay is in DirectSound.

Do you have any ideas?

UPDATE:
Unfortunately I wasn't able to solve this problem (to get things to work with Windows 7). I tried a lot of different things:

• Uninstall all 3:rd party software (clean Windows install)
• Old and new sound card drivers
• External USB sound card
• Etc etc.

I guess it is a combination of different things (hardware and software) that causes the problem, but I couldn't find it.

So finally I gave up and installed Windows XP on that computer (and everything works nicely)!

Answer 1

I doubt this has anything to do with DirectSound directly... as it is used in millions of applications without problem. I would suspect that whatever the method is you use to play the file is incorrect.

The problem could be anything from bad drivers or disk-caching, or even a badly written application or insufficient resources.. You haven't even told us if WMP was already running prior to clicking "play" or is this from a cold-boot? What is this sound module you're talking about... and how does it relate to your problem?