I talked a friend into trying foobar2000 and he did. He was not happy at all, mainly because he managed to burn one of his tweeters in 15 minutes.

I do not have all the details, but I can get them if you think this is a problem that should be fixed.

* WinXP
* Terratec 6fire
* Directsound output
* Computer connected to external DAC via spdif/optical.

He said something about the sound card not supporting hardware mixing and the default setting in fb2000 was on. So when another source tried to output sound at another sample rate, the sound card goes bananas and outputs very high noise that ended up killing the tweeter. According to him, Winamp has a different default setting.

Anyway, it is not entirely an issue with fb2000, but any program that can damage external hardware should IMHO come with warnings.

If this is a suggestion to add a phat "this program may damage your hardware" warning to foobar2000, I find it absurd.

I suggest that you direct your criticisms at terratec driver makers instead.

@Moneo - I do not suggest that. But it might be possible to make a list of sound cards that support hardware mixing and those that do not. Then it should be fairly to change the default setting.

Asking Terratec to fix the driver and/or make better sound cards is naturally a better solution. But since they have already sold a lot of cards and people have the drivers installed. So they are at risk.

What does "hardware mixing" have to do with this ? Foobar2000 DirectSound output can only either prevent hardware mixing from being used at all ("allow hardware mixing" unchecked), or let system decide to use it when available or revert to software mixing when not, just like all other players do ("allow hardware mixing" checked). You are not making any sense.

This sounds alot like the problem I have with my M-Audio Revolution 7.1. Quite often when I start a video or change to a track with a different sample rate than the previous one (at least this seems to be the case) this annoying sound is the result. Starting the track/video over again fixes it. I have tried different drivers, both version 1.0.2.8, 1.0.2.6 and the driver that was shipped with the card, but to no avail yet, and I'm out of ideas. I personally find M-Audio's drivers harder to install than usual, mostly because it's not easy to see which version is currently being used. I know that that is a known problem though.

If anyone knows of a general reason for this annoying sound or have any ideas, I would really appreciate it.

Specs: Windows XP SP1, current driver: 1.0.2.8

Btw: I guess I could have made my own thread or sent a mail to M-Audio, but it seemed to be the same problem as described in this thread.

It's a known bug of kimixer.sys, maybe.
Update for windows2000 (also work with XP)

more detail;
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=149125

I asked my friend for more details. He said everything works fine if the hardware mixing option is turned off. His other players behaves that way (WinDVD, PowerDVD, BSPlayer and Winamp).

If hardware mixing is turned on it works until sample rate or resolution is changed. Then sound card goes bananas and play noise that can damage equipment.

It is possible that it is an unfixed known bug in WinXP/2000. That just makes is a lot more important for the player to prevent the damage.

TerrorTec driver issue. Maybe your friend needs to complain to TerraTec. He can also try flash modding his 6fire and using Envy24ht drivers from a different vendor, such as Audiotrak or M-Audio. I am not sure how one would go about doing this, if it's even possible, or whether or not the process can be reversed, or whether or not it may damage your hardware. Research, and exercise caution.

Of course, he already lost his tweeters to a driver bug...

The topic linked above describes it as a kmixer bug and suggests replacing your copy of kmixer with a version that supposedly does not have the problem, but cannot play sounds over 96KHz, and probably does not support 7.1 output.

Yet, I am not sure if the problem exists with other vendors' Envy24ht drivers, or other sound cards. Whether it is a kmixer bug that driver developers must work around, driver developer stupidity, or perhaps a case of Microsoft doing something spoony that they don't document too well and that the developer has to discover on their own and deal with, I don't know.

Your mileage may vary, yadda yadda.

He just sent me output from Winamp status window:

> Certified: no, emulated: yes
> Supports sample rates from 100 Hz to 100000 Hz
> Hardware memory: N/A
> Hardware mixing: unsupported
> Speaker setup: stereo


IMHO it does not really matter where the fault lies and whom to complain to. Fact is, that you can seriously damage your stereo by normal usage of foobar2000 with a pretty standard sound card, WinXP and newest drivers. Considering the problem has been known for some time and other players does not have a problem, it seems likely that new drivers are not around the corner. Therefore steps should be taken.

But that is just my opinion. I do not have any problems with my sound card.

AHEM.

"Allow hardware mixing" is what every other application normally does. Unchecking that box causes Foobar2000's DirectSound output to create its buffers with the DSBCAPS_LOCSOFTWARE flag, which forces software mixing. Otherwise, the OS uses hardware mixing ONLY IF IT IS SUPPORTED. How many times does this need to be said before you get it?