Instant fix. Thanks a million.

When switching it to the waveOut the delay is virtually gone. I'll have to generate some different sine wave patterns or noise tomorrow to play and get more accurate timing. It is near perfect though. That then leads me to believe either it is the DirectSound plugin or the Windows DirectX that is causing the excessive delays. When tested waveOut used the default Microsoft Sound Mapper and when using the DirectSound plugin the default Primary Sound Driver.

I am out of town until Sunday evening so I will not be able to retest until then. However it is good to know that others have been able to reproduce this as well.

Can you switch output to WAVE OUT and set small buffer size (You can leave default 2000ms too) before retest?

I can confirm this behaviour.

I use MMgold and the StereoTool audio plugin for playback of my collection. One thing I have noticed is when looking at the processing / output display on StereoTool the data displayed is way out of sync with the audio being played. When you are approaching the end of a song ST shows that the song has finished (output display shows no audio/processing) before MM has finished playing the song. At first I thought this was something to do with StereoTool but in speaking with its author he says that it must be in how MM is sending the data over. I am seeing a 13-15 second difference between when ST shows it is done processing audio and when the song actually is done playing in MM. I've checked for different places in MM for where the delay could be coming from, crossfade, buffers, etc. However I have not found anything yet that could contribute this much. I think when I was using Winamp that there was a small delay in there but nothing of this magnitude. Any MM + ST users out there that have seen this type of behavior?