Help With Diagnosing Poor Music Sound Quality From A Computer

[Siki]

Hello

The music from my desktop computer has become very poor. The music skips and there is considerable flutter and wow. When I switch over to my laptop which runs the same music player with the same speakers the sound is fine just like my desktop used to be.

Does anyone have the experience to advise me on how to diagnose and solve this problem or know of a link that does the same?

Thanks

Siki

[raro]

Had the same problem before, I blame it on a totally overloaden Windows installation and after tweaking around for a while I eventually re-installed windows and since it works again...

[Cuban]

The music skips and there is considerable flutter and wow.

I'm sorry - this is not possible when using a normal MP3 type player on a computer. Wow and flutter are only encountered on analogue playback media such as tape or vinyl. *

You are probably trying to describe, short, sudden pauses __________ and ________ gaps in the playback of the music, along with fractions of a second where a note repeats, note repeats, note repeats.

The cause is probably your hard disk, if you have downloaded the music from a P2P network over time, each MP3 file that you have is likely to be divided up into many sections and stored in different places on your hard disk. Consider how easy it would be to read your daily newspaper if you separated each page and then placed each page in a different cupboard or drawer in different parts of the house - you need to move from place to place to read the paper.

To tidy up your HDD you need to do a thing called "Defragment the hard disk" aka 'defrag', fairly easy as there is software built into to most Windows operating systems to do this for you. Otherwise take a trial of an application like Disk Keeper to do this for you.

The defrag will search out different parts of the same file and place them together - like rebinding the newspaper.

Before you defrag - I suggest that you clean your browser's temporary file cache and remove rubbish from your HDD.

The defrag process can take a long time and is best not interupted - disable any screen savers, ICQ, MSN junk then run the defrag an hour or so before you retire for the night. Come back and see how it is doing, you can restart it if need be.

[ Find defag within the Tools Tab when looking at HDD Properties, right click the HDD name c:\ from within Explore - note that is Explore not Internet Explorer. Right click Start to begin with.]

Another possible cause is lack of memory within the PC - but if this were the case you would probably be complaining about slow web browsing etc.

HTH.

* - You may hear W&F if the original recording came from such an anaolgue source.

Edited April 15, 2008 by Cuban

[Siki]

You are correct that I am not hearing flutter and wow. I am hearing what you describe.

My disks are generally defragmented (with Diskeeper) but your response got me thinking that I may have created the problem by placing the music on drive “D” and the player on drive “C” (of course). I placed some of the music on drive “C” and it played perfectly- Great, that must be the answer. However, when I now go back to drive “D” and play those songs- no problem.

Well it must be the memory. I load every memory hog that I have and start printing a page. The music still plays perfectly.

Maybe I was trying to defrag and listen to music at the same time. I try this and, again, no problem.

I am puzzled but not unhappy.

Thank you for your gracious responses.

Aloha

Siki

[Crossy]

Playing MP3 files doesn't take much processing power (at least for a modern PC), if you're getting jumps either the files are damaged or something's swallowing resources.

Try running the Task Manager -> <ctl><alt><del> -> Task Manager -> Performance, whilst playing your iffy files, if you see anything approaching 100% CPU usage check the 'Processes' tab and see what's using all your oomph

It's possible that you have a full/badly fragmented drive, but IMHO it would have to be really bad to screw music playback.

A thought, are they USB speakers? I've had similar issues in the past with a USB -> BlueTooth dongle (with a BlueTooth mouse) and some USB speakers, no problem with regular speakers, there was some issue with USB bandwidth

Edited April 15, 2008 by Crossy

[Cuban]

To resove the question about memory resources, open up task manager and take a look at both memory usage and system performance, see if the MP3 player is having a hard time.

If HDD fragmentation is not an issue, it might be surface errors?

Do you have a good working swap file? Good size? (2.5 times the size of installed RAM memory is a good value.)

Does the MP3 file sound OK when moved to the C: ? (if not suggests sound card or driver issues)

Come back if this does not narrow down the fault.