Unstable audio on cds and dvds

I am having a very strange problem. I have perfect audio when I am playing music or video from my hard drive, but if the source is a cd or dvd, the sound is slightly distorted and jumpy. It is a new computer and all my drivers appear to be working, up to date and compatable. I am using a tdk dvdrw1612dlb. XP home, gigabyte motherboard with built in sound card.

I also cannot rip a cd and listen to music at the same time. As soon as I start ripping, the playback becomes distorted. Never had such problems on my older more basic computer.

Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

Welcome to WinDrivers.

This is probably the source of your problem:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by simpson17

built in sound card.

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Current systems typically use a software CODEC based sound, and play CDs digitally, whereas your previous system probably had a real hardware soundcard, and played CDs over an analog audio connection to the card, and music from the hard drive was also partly handled by the sound card hardware. Some motherboards have a hardware CODEC option, and if this is not fitted there may be an empty set of pads on the board for an Integrated Circuit, labelled CODEC.

If there's no hardware CODEC, there's a heck of a lot more being done in software, which makes a lot more demands on the CPU. Even if it's a fair bit faster, you still get degradation as the CPU has to attend to other things, which happens a fair bit in XP, which is a pretty heavily loaded Operating System.

If this is the basic cause of the problem, there are several things that may improve the situation (apart from fitting a decent hardware sound card...).

Check in the Device Manager if DMA is functioning properly on all your drives, that up-to-date motherboard drivers are installed, if there is an audio connection from the CD drive to the motherboard, set the drive to play analog (disable Digital Extraction).

If you are using the system on-line, especially P2P or "music" sites, make sure the system is well secured with all OS and browser patches up-to-date, firewall enabled, anti virus and anti-malware software up-to-date and active, and check the System Monitor for any processes with unusually high CPU usage.

Also an XP system is usually not delivered in any kind of optimised form, if you want to get that advanced there are usually quite a few services running in the background chewing up CPU power, that are not needed in many cases and can be set to not automatically start at boot.

Thanks for the advice Platypus. I have looked at my motherboard and believe I do have a hardware codec, there is certainly a box in the audio section. The sound card is a realtek AC07 audio, which from what I have read is meant to be quite good.

The drivers are all up to date and I have set it to play analogue.

Given it sounds fine when played back from thehard disc, I am wondering whetehr it is a dvd drive problem. I am using a 16 x dual layer dvd writer. Brand new. Should be ok but...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Platypus

Welcome to WinDrivers.

This is probably the source of your problem:



Current systems typically use a software CODEC based sound, and play CDs digitally, whereas your previous system probably had a real hardware soundcard, and played CDs over an analog audio connection to the card, and music from the hard drive was also partly handled by the sound card hardware. Some motherboards have a hardware CODEC option, and if this is not fitted there may be an empty set of pads on the board for an Integrated Circuit, labelled CODEC.

If there's no hardware CODEC, there's a heck of a lot more being done in software, which makes a lot more demands on the CPU. Even if it's a fair bit faster, you still get degradation as the CPU has to attend to other things, which happens a fair bit in XP, which is a pretty heavily loaded Operating System.

If this is the basic cause of the problem, there are several things that may improve the situation (apart from fitting a decent hardware sound card...).

Check in the Device Manager if DMA is functioning properly on all your drives, that up-to-date motherboard drivers are installed, if there is an audio connection from the CD drive to the motherboard, set the drive to play analog (disable Digital Extraction).

If you are using the system on-line, especially P2P or "music" sites, make sure the system is well secured with all OS and browser patches up-to-date, firewall enabled, anti virus and anti-malware software up-to-date and active, and check the System Monitor for any processes with unusually high CPU usage.

Also an XP system is usually not delivered in any kind of optimised form, if you want to get that advanced there are usually quite a few services running in the background chewing up CPU power, that are not needed in many cases and can be set to not automatically start at boot.

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