2 Dance Pads causes stuttering/freezing

As the title states, I have 2 metal pads. Both work properly when plugged in individually. When I get both connected and have a person on each when stuff gets "intense" the game will freeze visually. Both are plugged into separate usb ports, my computer is well over qualified to run stepmania as well. This has happened once before when I had only 1 pad plugged in as well. Also during a very heavy song. (pun intended)

I was thinking that this probably has something to do with how windows is reading the inputs for game controllers and it gets bogged down and drops data. Any thoughts?

I am running:
Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit
16gb RAM
Radeon 6900
4ghz AMD proc

Stepmania 5 Betav3

Try upgrading to StepMania 5.0.6 first and see if the problems are fixed.

I tried it in that version as well, however I ended up going back to my current version because I didn't like how the menus were setup. (I like the arcade style)

I doubt it's your pads, it may just be the number of arrows drawn on the screen at the same time that is causing your PC to lag. Try it with two player keyboard and see if it lags.

If it's the number of arrows on screen, 5.0.6 has the Fast Note Rendering option that gives a huge boost for dense arrows, and an optimization in how arrows are drawn that gives a smaller but still measurable boost.

Also, I'm confused by your comment that you don't like how the menus are set up. The menus in the default theme haven't changed that much, the only differences are better speed mods and a bunch of extra options in the service menu.

Hmm I may have to give the latest version another try then. I didn't know about those options.

The largest reason i didn't like the latest was how they changed the speed menu. I like just 1x 1.5x 2x as the options, less to buttons to press. If there was a way to change that back to how it used to be I could get past some of the other minor annoyances.

I changed the speed mod setting system because a fixed set like what was there before does not fit everybody, and people were asking for help with CustomSpeedMods.txt every month or two. If you really prefer the CustomSpeedMods system, you can edit the metrics.ini of the theme you use to change it back. Search for "lua,ArbitrarySpeedMods()" and change it to "lua,CustomSpeedMods()".
One thing to consider is that Stepmania stores the last speed mod you used in your profile. If you haven't already, you should create a profile in the Profiles section of the service menu and use it. Additionally, M mods exist so that you don't need to pick a different X mod for every song, and thus needing a couple extra key presses isn't an issue because it's so much more rare to need to change your speed mod.

Thank you for the input! I will try out some of this stuff and see how it works. I'll update once i get a moment to test.