I eagerly read An Overview of Windows Sound and Music “Glitching” Issues by Steve Ball, Senior Program Manager for Sound in Windows Vista, hoping to find out. Sadly, it offers no insight other than saying what a tough job it is for a busy operating system to play back audio smoothly.

I’d like to highlight a few of the comments to his post

The last time I remember my MP3s glitching was back when I had a P75mhz (which should be of no surprise). The only other time I had my MP3s glitch was when I upgraded my PC to Vista. This same machine (exact same hardware) which had XP running on it, *never* had an MP3 glitch. On Vista, sound **constantly** glitched. Merely scrolling web pages caused sound issues…honestly my mobile phone can play MP3s, while I surf the web, on a call and text message; all without any glitches. [from ateharani]

and this from explorer5:

Steve – Thanks for posting this article.. I’m hoping that in the second part of the series you will mention how and why “glitching” is appearing (sounding) on Windows Vista computers when those same exact computers when Windows XP was installed had no issues with sound quality.

and this, from divil:

When MS first announced that Vista could guarantee glitch-free media playback because of new kernel scheduling APIs my first thought was “what glitching?” since I’d never experienced it outside of DOS on slow machines. Now ironically, with Vista, I do get that wonderful experience. On a new PC.

Couldn’t agree more. See here for my earlier post: Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven.