Sound/Mp3 Annoyances

[ZipTriX]

I can play sounds and have no problems, except for mp3s. When I boot up my pc, the Windows Start sound is fine. There is no crackling, popping or skipping. When I play a game, all sounds are fine. When I play a mp3, using Winamp 2, I can hear a high pitch crackling and popping noise. Sometimes the mp3s will skip. Any ideas what is causing this and how I can fix it?

All drivers have been update.
I have also moved my sound card to different PCI slots.
I have also tried other speakers.

None have resolved the problem.

System Specs
Soyo KT333 Dragon Platinum
Athlon XP 1900+
1024 MB DDR
SB Audigy Platinum
GF 4 Ti4400

Thanks.

 

[GreenFrog]

Have you tried a different MP3 player?

 

[jawshoouh]

in the WinAMP Prefs, at the Options setting, near the bottom...what process priority class do you have it set at? it should be at normal, but maybe playing with it will help. also, at the Output setting, select the output plugin you're using (i'm using Crossfading DirectSound output v1.37) and hit the Configure button; what does the Device drop-down menu say? mine says Primary Sound Driver, and whichver yours does, you may want to select the other one, if you can. you can also fiddle around with the Advanced Settings/Preset (low-latency vs. standard vs. max skipping protection, etc.)

 

[jawshoouh]

oh, and is it with specific mp3s, or ALL mp3s?

 

[ZipTriX]

I will post again to answer if it only does it with certain mp3s or not. I'm going to mess with options now and post an update. Yes I have tried other mp3 players and stillthe same problem exists.

 

[jawshoouh]

Originally posted by ZipTriX
I will post again to answer if it only does it with certain mp3s or not. I'm going to mess with options now and post an update. Yes I have tried other mp3 players and stillthe same problem exists.

if it's just particular mp3s, you may wanna toss em and try to obtain them again elsewhere

 

[ZipTriX]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH more than half have the noise. *cries*

What causes it?

 

[jawshoouh]

more than half have the noise but the other half play fine? if that's the case, i'd lean toward it's a problem with the mp3 files themselves, not your hardware, or your software. especially since it's doing it on other mp3 players. maybe someone ripped the mp3s with a crappy program. has it always been this way? did you have another sound card (not the audiology plat) that these mp3s played fine on? or did you just download these mp3s, and they started making these noises?

like i said, if it's only happening to a select number of mp3s on different mp3 players, then it sounds like an mp3-file problem. if it happens to all sorts of random mp3s on different players, then i dunno...sounds like you're SOL til someone else can help you

 

[dijital]

Originally posted by ZipTriX
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH more than half have the noise. *cries*

What causes it?

a bad cd ripper like audiocatalyst. enuff said.

 

[ZipTriX]

The noise is still there when I tried my onboard sound. Couldn't tell you if they have always been like this. My last sound card was a SB Live and compared to the Audigy it was a POS I can hear cymbols now, that I couldn't before. lol

Oh well I'll delete them all and redownload them. No biggie. One thing though. What is Vorbis and how does the quality and compression compare to that of a 128 mp3? I've assigned 60 GB of hard drive space strictly for music, but I want to store a large number of mp3s, as small as possible, without losing CD quality sampling.

Also, what is an excellent program, that provides the same features as Power Audio Tools and Easy CD-DA Extractor. In the past I used both programs, but now I'm in fear that they could have caused the distoration in my mp3s. I used them to convert all my mp3s to the same sampling rate.

 

[dreamliner77]

Vorbis will give you better than Mp3 quality at a smaller bit rate, but remember, there is not, at the moment, widespread support for it. The best you can do for making mp3 is

Use Exact Audio Copy to rip your cd's

Use Lame to encode