Glitch Free: Tuning Windows for Reliable Real-Time Audio Performance

Are you a musician using a Windows PC for digital audio processing? Perhaps you’re composing music or perhaps you’re performing on stage. In either case you’ve almost certainly encountered issues with audio ‘glitches’ while using your software.

These glitches might manifest as audio dropouts, clicking, stuttering or other artefacts. Sometimes they occur often, sometimes rarely and seemingly completely at random.

If any of this sounds familiar to you then this guide is for you.

As the developer of music software designed specifically for live performance, I’ve spent over ten years helping customers to get their machines running reliably.

In this guide I hope to bring together all that information into an in-depth yet easy to follow set of steps that explain the things to check and how to fix the problems found. Along the way I’ll also be going into reasonable detail about what’s happening under the covers and why the topics being discussed matter.