Audio drop-out at .5 - 2.0 seconds when other party answers

[rbsmith2000]

I have two magicjacks, each running on a dedicated computer. Both are running on the same USCable Internet modem via a router with Ethernet connections to the computers running the MJs.

The main house MJ is connected into the house phone wiring, Qwest is disconnected from the house. The MJ is on a powered USB hub, plugged into a USB 1.1 port and MagicFeatures is also installed. The computer is an old Compaq Presario 2199US laptop with an AMD CPU. MS Security Essentials is the AV. It works well except for one fluke. Whenever I call someone, when they answer, I hear the first half second of audio, then this is followed by about 1.5 seconds of silence then the audio picks back up to normal. This is repeatable when calling VRUs. No other audio drop-outs have been observed. VRU interaction is normal. Has anyone seen this problem and have a solution?

The other MJ is on an old KDS Valient laptop (1 GHZ Pentium3, USB 1.1) plugged into a cordless base, a VTech DECT 6 with 3 handsets. MS Security Essentials is the AV. No MagicFeatures Addin. When calling with this setup, the audio drop-out does not occur.

[Diggs]

You may be a bit short on CPU. Bring up Task Manager (Ctl-Alt-Del) and click the performance tab. See if the CPU spikes to 100% during these "outages".

[rbsmith2000]

Hits peak of 42% total CPU, 32% for exe. (CPU is AMD M-Athlon 2800+, that is faster than the Pentium3 on the other unit). Have also tried swapping out phone to the DECT 6 base, with no change. Also tried bypassing powered hub with no change. I did need to restart .exe with all this plugging-unplugging. The only thing that changed was the amount of time until the audio drop-out. Max was 1 second delay, then a 1 second dropout.

[bitstopjoe]

You may want to check to see if your router has the latest firmware from the mfg..

[rbsmith2000]

Yes it is up to date. It is an Extreme-N D-Link DIR-655, but the Ethernet ports are used, not the wireless. Plus, one of the MJ connections works fine, but the other does not. Does anyone know what happens in the first 3 seconds when the called-party answers?

[redpepper]

Yes. When the other end answers it sends a message that includes a prioritized list of codecs to use for audio transmission and the port to use to send the UDP packets containing the audio stream.

Once that message is received your end then uses that information to start transmitting audio to the party that answered. That of course immediately picks up the real time CPU horsepower and RAM the magicJack dialer needs to effectively continue processing the call.

The issue you are describing sounds like something is seriously competing with the magicJack dialer for real time CPU and/or RAM resources. For whatever reason, it appears that there is not enough to go around.

Make sure you have at least 512MB RAM and double check to make sure you have the magicJack.exe and the MagicfeaturesPlugin.exe included as program exceptions with full privileges in your Antivirus software. If for some odd chance you have Bonjour running on your computer kill it as it has been identified by some users to very seriously tear up real time on some Windows installations.

[rbsmith2000]

Stranger and stranger - while trying to debug this, I switched MJs between computers. The unit that was working fine, no longer does. It appears that the release level has changed from 2.0.4 to 2.0.6. Is there a way to downlevel the software?

[rbsmith2000]

One last piece of info on this. I watched the connection messages on the soft-dialer. The dropout appears to occur during a "Pending ACK" message.

[rbsmith2000]

After finding some posts particular to the D-LINK DIR-655 xtreme N router, I found info on disabling ALG. There are 4 categories of ALG under "Advanced/Firewall". I disabled "PPTP", "RTSP" and "SIP" and the "pending ACK" disappeared. There is no more drop-out problem. Also, for this router, downleveling the firmware to 1.21 is recommended, but it is very difficult. Upgrading hardware level A3 to 1.35 does not help.