LatencyMon : Check if Your PC Can Play Music in Realtime

These days you can carry your entire favorite music collection on your mobile devices as the mobile devices storage can now have multiple gigabytes. But when you are working on your notebook or desktop computer, you do not want to keep the earphones plugged into your ears. Instead you can play music on your notebook or desktop computer while you are working on something. This not only saves the energy consumption, but also is much more comfortable to your ears. But playing music on a desktop PC may not be a good idea if it is not able to play the music smoothly.

The chances are pretty low that your computer is not able to play the music without dropping some portions of the audio due to hardware issues. but you can use the freeware LatencyMon to check your computer for such problems. Using LatencyMon is very easy – all you have to do is launch the LatencyMon application, play some music on your computer and then click on the green play button. You can play music using any media player and open MP3 files or connect to any online radio station. I personally use Winamp to listen to some of MP3 files that I have stored on the local hard disk.

LatencyMon

As soon as you click on the green play button in the LatencyMon application, your system is put to all types of test and a -data is displayed on the screen. It displays the measured interrupt to process the latency (both the current and the highest latency), ISR and DPC execution times and more. If you also see hard page fault errors, then your system perhaps is having a little difficulty playing the music. However, the application displays plain text message on the top if your system is suitable for handling real-time audio playback without dropouts.

LatencyMon can be used to see if a Windows PC is good enough for playing the music in real time without having any possible difficulties. Even if it finds your system unsuitable, you can still play the music but you may not be able to hear some fragments of the music here and there at times.

You can download LatencyMon from http://www.resplendence.com/.