Thread: Milkdrop plays choppy

Originally Posted by Erwin

Is it normal that the visualisation milkdrop plays choppy?

Ik have a Epia M1000 512 MB mem, and the milkdrop vis play's choppy. I have milkdrop configurated at 25 fps and the CPU usage is 50%. Even on my P4 it plays choppy, is this normal?

The vis also doesn't stay fullscreen. When I double click on the vis screen the screen flashes to fullscreen for a moment and directly after that it jumps back to the normal screen. How do I solve that?

Hey Erwin,

I found out that the visualisations do not lag when you turn off the scrolling text in RoadRunner

Guino told me this:
just edit your .skin files and change any lines that have "scroll" at the end of the lines to "".

This worked for me!

I found AVS to be much faster and less CPU consuming. The beat detection code also looks better. I'm using AVS now.

MilkDrop is VERY CPU intensive, I don't like the effect of it on a 1Ghz machine.. you can reduce the size of the plugin on screen to make it faster, but AVS runs much better.

Thanks for everybody's help.

I found out that the milkdrop vis plays choppy at certain trance music (e.g. DJ tiesto - love comes again), when I play other music it doesn't play choppy. I also tried the same music on my P4, and there the same problem occured with the same music. So it can't be the CPU. So I think the problem is the alogaritm detecting the music.

I also tried the AVS vis but it isn't as good looking as the milkdrop, and it uses almost the same CPU time as the milkdrop. I think I use milkdrop for now and listen no more trance music


My only problem left is that the vis doesnt stay fullscreen. When I double click the vis screen the vis flashes to fullscreen and directly after that it jumps back to the normal 'music' screen. What causes this problem?

I just tried out the latest MilDrop plugin and there's some kind of high CPU usage in RR when you activate the vis plugin.. seems like some sort of bug in RR at first, so it may be related.. I'll be taking a look at it..

Originally Posted by guino

I just tried out the latest MilDrop plugin and there's some kind of high CPU usage in RR when you activate the vis plugin.. seems like some sort of bug in RR at first, so it may be related.. I'll be taking a look at it..

Thank you!


I also noticed that when I stop the vis the CPU usage stays very high (about 50%). Only when I go back to the main menu the CPU usage drops back to the normal 5%-10%.

That's what I'm seeing too.. but it works in AVS perfectly so it's something related to handling MilkDrop. Also, normal usage on my 1.2Ghz is between 1-3% .. you may want to check the added post on the FAQ for Flash/High CPU etc..

Ok, I've spent the entire night looking for this "bug" in RR that caused the extra CPU load using MilkDrop and here's what I found out: THERE'S NOTHING WRONG IN RR.

Instead, there's some kind of stupid bug in the Flash.ocx (By Macromedia) that on CERTAIN machines (or perhaps video cards), messes up the CPU work load -- my best guess is that the VIS plugin is using CPU which causes the Flash file to loose synchrony and furthermore stay out of sync making the flash movie try harder to display the stuff on the screen (but it never does "catch up"). I disabled all kinds of stuff in RR looking for it and it wasn't until I prevented it from displaying the flash movie that it started to work normally. This does not happen if you don't use a skin that doesn't have flash... I tried all kinds of stuff to prevent it from happening without any success.. basically you'll have to pick between flash and milkdrop... This does not mean EVERYBODY has to do that.. it really depends on your machine.. for instance:

-My Laptop is 2.2Ghz and has a GForce2 4200 -- Works Fine
-My Desktop is 2.4Ghz and has an ATI AIW 8500DV -- Messes up with Flash

I'm sorry but after trying for so long I give up in making it work.. I can only hope that a new flash player version will have this fixed ... Perhaps a different type of Flash animation (frame based) would not have the same issue.. but I have nothing else to try it with.

Thanks Guino.

I'll go for Milkdrop.

I still have the problem that the vis doesn't stay fullscreen, do you know how I can solve this?