I recently had a problem when playing movies through iTunes on a laptop. At various parts of the movie, the entire laptop would become extremely slow, causing the movie to sputter. This happened at infrequent intervals. The laptop has a dual core 1.6Ghz and 2GB of RAM, so I new it was more than capable of playing a movie.
To look into the problem, I had the performance monitor running while I played a movie. Once the movie began to slow and sputter, I viewed the performance monitor to see which process was causing the problem. When I viewed the performance monitor I noticed that a process called audiodg.exe was consuming 35-40% of the CPU. I then investigated the problem and found a probable fix to the issue.
What is Audiodg.exe?
The audiodg.exe file made its appearance in Microsoft Vista, which explains why I haven’t seen this file before. When I viewed the properties of the file, the description stated Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation, which doesn’t help explain what it does.
After doing a little research I found out that the audiodg.exe file hosts the audio engine for Vista, and from what I hear Windows 7 as well. All the DSP and audio processing is performed within this file. Vendors are able to install their own DSP and audio effects into the audio pipeline, which will then be processed by audiodg.exe.
Unfortunately, this can also lead to some problems, as I experienced. Some audio effects can consume CPU and memory if not properly coded. How do we fix the problem? Lets take a look.
Disabling Audio Effects
In order to fix the high CPU usage, I disabled the audio enhancements processed by the audiodg.exe file. To disable the audio enhancements, use the following steps:
- Right-click the speaker icon in the lower right corner.
- Select Playback Devices from the menu. A list of devices should appear on the screen.
- Double-click the device that has a green checkmark. The properties windows for that device should open.
- Click the Enhancements tab at the top.
- From the list of enhancements, uncheck all of them, or click the Disable all enhancements checkbox.
- Click the OK button to save your changes and close the window.
- Click OK to close the Playback Devices window.
Once I disabled the enhancements, the movie played without any issues. I also didn’t notice any difference in sound with the enhancements disabled. If I do want to use sound enhancements, I’ll stick to the the options provided in the application.
Thanks for the tip. On my old pc, the sound sometimes stuttered when playing movies, mp3s, and even some system sounds. This appears to have helped so far.
The same issue, this tip helped
Thanks Paul. Good advice and research.
…/Many Thanks
Your a lifesaver. I was having the same problem with music playback and it was really starting to irritate! This has totally helped. Thanks
Freakin sweet
My audiodg usage went from 15% to 2% after doing this! Thanks a million.
Wonderful tip. Solved my problem. Now ma machine runs smoothly.
Absolutely spot on. I was ready to tear my hair out when my new dual core 3G RAM AMD Athlon laptop could not play music let alone movies due to this serious memory leak. Problem solved, thanks a million.
this setting was also creating extreme load in lag in gaming.ie, everquest2.
memory and cpu usage were at 48% and 87% respectivly. this is being run on the new windows 7 btw . it seems to have fixed the worst of it thanks…
So the new version of Windows has a similar issue. Good to know.
i had the same problem, but doing what he sais didn’t help me a bit….my audiodg.exe consumes 20% ore more of cpu,so i found out that if you have a driver ….like me…realtek and you go to default format…and u change the quality lower the problem dissepires….if you do what he sais its not recomanded, because if it works your sound will be very week(quality)
great thing dude!!!! it works also on windows 7 rtm, now my computer’s a lot more solid i have a dual core cpu and when playing music with foobar used 50% of the cpus and after the fix 0% like it has to be!