Problem With External Drive

[Doctor John]

I put audio files from my laptop onto an external drive, when I connect to my desktop and want to play the music, it sounds really strange, echo type of effect, yet when i connect the external back to the laptop, it sounds fine.

I have windows XP home on my laptop and Widows XP pro on my desktop.

Plus some video files will not play on the desktop, but will on the laptop, using the external drive, am I missing something really simple?

Any ideas?

Thank's guys.

[Firefoxx]

To determine whether the drive is the culprit, copy the audio files to the desktop harddisk, and then play them from there. If you still have problems, then the drive has nothing to do with it. If that's the case, then the cause of the echo may be the sound settings of your desktop.

Edited February 8, 2005 by tukyleith

[autonomous_unit]

I put audio files from my laptop onto an external drive, when I connect to my desktop and want to play the music, it sounds really strange, echo type of effect, yet when i connect the external back to the laptop, it sounds fine.

I have windows XP home on my laptop and Widows XP pro on my desktop.

Plus some video files will not play on the desktop, but will on the laptop, using the external drive, am I missing something really simple?

Any ideas?

Thank's guys.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'll bet your laptop has USB2 high speed ports, while your desktop has only USB 1.1 ports. The difference is peak transfers of around 480 Mb/s vs only 11 Mb/s. Even USB 1.1 really should be plenty for MP3 or other compressed audio files, but the access latencies may be too high if your player software does not do reasonable prefetching and buffering. Video would be out of the question except at very low bitrates.

Try copying a large file (10-50 MB) from external to internal drive and timing it on both computers.

[Tufty]

Are you using the mp3 player from your external drive or do you use differant ones on the laptop and desktop, if the latter then are enhancements / EQ presets the same

[Doctor John]

Thank's guys,

What I done was moved the whole shared files file from my laptop, over to the external hard drive, Now the music will not play on the desktop computer, but when I click on the file and ask it to be played when connected to the laptop, no problem, so I guess the external drive is ok.

I downloaded i-Tunes yesterday from the internet onto my desktop, connected the external, asked it to play, and same result, a very hollow sound...............also a hollow sound for the video files, but no picture at all, again , this is ok on the Laptop.

I thought these Mp3 files would just play automatically when connected to windows media player or Real player. What is in my laptop that is not in my desktop to make the difference? These files where all downloaded from the Internet via file sharing, Zazaa.

Confused.

[autonomous_unit]

...

I thought these Mp3 files would just play automatically when connected to windows media player or Real player.  What is in my laptop that is not in my desktop to make the difference? These files where all downloaded from the Internet via file sharing, Zazaa.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

As I said in my earlier post, it might be as simple as your laptop supporting faster transfer rates. Whether this makes sense or not depends on what these strange sounds are really like. There is no audio signal going from drive to computer, so the drive connection is not hi-fi or lo-fi... But if the computer cannot read the media files fast enough to keep it fed with data while it is decoding audio to the soundcard, all sorts of strange artifacts may occur.

Try benchmarking the file reading speed from the drive to the computer in each case. Copying a big file from external drive to computer w/ a stopwatch to time should be good enough... we're looking for a dramatic 5-10 times difference in speed!

If the PC is much slower, the question then is why. One possibility would be that it has older USB 1.1 hardware, in which case you would want to buy a newer USB2 adapter card to stick in a PCI slot. If there is some other driver/software problem, it would require a Windows techie to sort out. I wonder if there is some easy way to inspect the USB hardware under Windows to see if it supports the USB2 high-speed rates? I remember plugging a USB2 drive into a Windows XP machine one time and getting an explicit warning that a high-speed device was being used in a slower compatibility mode and "click here to troubleshoot". In my case, it was because the computer lacked USB2 ports. Did you see something like that the first time you used the drive in the PC?