havyn Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 Problem: Popping or cracking during MP3 playback. CD's seem to play fine, which is puzzling, but the decoding is horrible for other formats, and especially noticable in MP3's. Pertinent Stats: WinXP Pro 2600 Aureal Audio 2.0 (Turtle Beach Montego II) Soundcard latest Directsound Drivers Winamp 2.78c This problem does not show itself in 98SE or 2k at all, and has only started happening since installing XP. All I can think of is that XP's Aureal drivers (from MS) are crap, and that my original Aureal drivers were better. Problem is, those drivers are no longer available because Aureal was bought out by Creative (I see which maker I should have gone with....). Anyone else having this problem, or, better yet, found a solution? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimmyt302 Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 this happens to me too sometimes, when i have my winamp volume too high. so i just put it at midrange and then manually adjust my spearkers to get rid of the popping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted February 11, 2002 Author Share Posted February 11, 2002 Originally posted by tagler this happens to me too sometimes, when i have my winamp volume too high. so i just put it at midrange and then manually adjust my spearkers to get rid of the popping. I don't think it is a software amplification problem (what you seem to be describing) because it happens no matter what the volume is. But thanks for the suggestion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scorbing Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 Originally posted by havyn Problem: Popping or cracking during MP3 playback. CD's seem to play fine, which is puzzling, but the decoding is horrible for other formats, and especially noticable in MP3's. Pertinent Stats: WinXP Pro 2600 Aureal Audio 2.0 (Turtle Beach Montego II) Soundcard latest Directsound Drivers Winamp 2.78c This problem does not show itself in 98SE or 2k at all, and has only started happening since installing XP. All I can think of is that XP's Aureal drivers (from MS) are crap, and that my original Aureal drivers were better. Problem is, those drivers are no longer available because Aureal was bought out by Creative (I see which maker I should have gone with....). Anyone else having this problem, or, better yet, found a solution? Thanks! try going to Creative and see if they have a driver. Also, make sure you are using a quality MP3 encoder not some crappy one like Xing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryanmcv Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 I read somewhere that this issue is going to be fixed in the Windows XP SP1. Dont know if it will or not, but we will find out soon. ;) The same thing always happens to me. Stats: Windows XP Pro 256MB SDRAM 1.0 GHz AMD Athlon Processor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
axis Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 I had this problem too, I solved it by turning down the Wave volume in winamp, and see if you have an option called 3d Depth in your audio control panel, and turn that all the way down. And dont just turn the wave down in the audio CP, cuz it will go right back up in winamp if you didnt set it in winamp. Mine is at 25% in winamp and no clicks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted February 12, 2002 Author Share Posted February 12, 2002 thanks all. for some reason my output volume is also always kind of low (no matter the OS/speakers) unless i turn the wave/master volume on software to 70% or so. i guess it could be signal attenuation errors there, but it still doesn't explain why 98 and 2k work great. go fig. i hope you're right about the service pack. for now, i have rolled the drivers back to the earliest provided by XP and the problem seems to occur less. thanks for the replies! ~havyn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryanmcv Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 i definately think it is a driver problem though.... there is supposed to be an updated driver in WinXP SP1. this never happened when i had windows Me. it is really annoying. some times that popping is fast like POP POP! and other times it is slow like POP...........(5 seconds later).....POP! sometimes i just want to take a baseball bat and smash my speakers!! LOL :D :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EmuZombie Veteran Posted February 12, 2002 Veteran Share Posted February 12, 2002 make sure dma is turned on for your hard drive... that's almost always the main cause of problems like this. to check go to the start menu, right click my computer, select properties. The go to the hardware tab and click device manager. Then under IDE ATA//ATPI Controlers, double click primary ide controler and click the advanced settings tab. Make sure both have "DMA if Avaliable" seclected. If they don't, change them. If they already did, see what it says under current mode. If it says PIO then something's probably wrong with your bios settings or you're using a very old hard drive and should consider buying a new one. If it says Ultra DMA or anything about DMA then this isn't the problem and you can ignore my post :p If you needed to change that setting, restart and then see if it still happens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arsekicker Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 he doesn't have a creative sound card, he should go to turtle beach for the latest sound card drivers, dur some more info about your setup would be good too, like mb, chipset, processor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brukro Posted February 12, 2002 Share Posted February 12, 2002 I had the same problem. I think it is in the visualizations. Depending which one I had running, the popping and crackling noise was either better or worse. I did not do anything to fix the problem as it seemed to fix itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted February 12, 2002 Author Share Posted February 12, 2002 440-BX chipset (this is a pretty solid board...) Intel Pentium III @ 500 mhz 256mb SDRAM both primary and secondary channels are set on DMA if available. Both of my harddrives are UDMA-2 currently, so I don't think that's the issue. I really think it is a driver issue as well, but I was just wondering if others had the same problem, and that seems to be the case. Not much we can do about it now until new drivers are released. For what it's worth, I've tried the last w2k drivers (in beta, last version created by Aureal) with XP and it doesn't solve anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spyder Veteran Posted February 12, 2002 Veteran Share Posted February 12, 2002 i'm inclined to agree that its a software problem somewhere, but indulge me for a second. I had a 440BX board and it was solid as a rock so I know where you're coming from. Trading it for my current VIA based board was one of the worst things I've done but thats another story... Anyways, is your soundcard sharing an IRQ at the hardware level? My suggestion is to check your MB manual and see what PCI slots share IRQs with other slots/USB/AGP/etc at the hardware level, and then move the soundcard to a PCI slot that won't be shared with anything else. I had popping. This solved my problem, but it was on a different chipset. Still worth a try if it applies to you though. (PS. you seem to be in the know, but just in case, checking if your devices are sharing IRQ's from within Windows isn't the same as what I mentioned above.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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