OK....well...I have a M-Audio USB Duo...and I thought I had been having problems with it...but come to find out that they are not the ones I originally thought they were...I thought I was having issues with the ASIO because...I couldn't get windows to detect the Duo in ASIO mode...(ASIO drivers bypass windows mixer, Doh!) So I found out that I need to run it in MME mode...Well, I tried this and Ta Da!...I was so damn happy...everything seemed to be finally working properly...YET...The other problem I was having in the beggining - when I was using the ASIO drivers started happening again.

Here is what happens: If I play a song...OUT OF NOWHERE...the audio drops out and this HORRIBLE static...fuzz...feedback..NOISE!!! Comes blaring out louder than the music was playing!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Make your damn heart skip a frigging beat when it happens.....It is GOD awful!!!!

I have used Foobar...and WINAMP....and this problem has occured with both. Ths last time I was using Foobar with waveout and buffering set to 1000ms.

Can anyone shed some light on this PLEASE?! What is going on....I thought it was a driver problem...yet, I switched to the MME..and it does it even worse!

Wow, this sounds like the exact same problem I had with my Revo right at the very end of 2003 after I had it without any problems for about 45 days. I remember the first time it occurred out of nowhere when I made no major or even superficial changes to my setup. It was incredibly painful, I didn't even think my speakers could get that loud. It's like this awful screeching, crackling representation of a song and the volume completely disregards any of my settings (think around the year 3000 or so if the loudness race continued to perpetuate at the same pace ). This screeching would remain until I rebooted or strangely until I would generate a clip of pink noise with a sampling rate no less than 96khz. Upon playing the clip everything would resume back to normal for a undeterminable amount of time.
What's makes it more strange is that it disappeared as inexplicably as it occurred. I kept looking for patterns and looking for patterns but couldn't find anything concrete. I changed drivers several times and restored to a point that I knew didn't have these problems but to no avail. At first I thought it was just certain progs but I reproduced it with just about every media player, then I thought it was my speakers and perhaps they were dying because it didn't seem to be happening with my headphones so I stopped using my speakers altogether and used the headphones only and like a week went by with nothing and then it started to happen with even those. Started happening more and more frequently, could only get by a few hours without being deafened so then I finally wrote M-audio and they told me it sounded like the board was bad and to get an RMA so then just my luck that's when the problem went away mysteriously and has been gone for well over 100 days.
So, in short I have no idea how to solve this problem if it is indeed the same problem but it is interesting (and scary) it's occurring with someone else with a different M-audio card. Hopefully someone can be of more assistance, for the both of us because I'd really like to know what could cause something like this.

LOL darn it.....I thought you were the Oracle I had been looking for....who was gonna swoop down and shine some like on this most confounding problem!

I am just glad that someone else knows what I am talking about and going through....cus the guys at M-Audio sure do not know what I mean. And I have posted this on some other boards with very experienced audiophiles...and they can't seem to figure it out either. I have tried a bunch of stuff...but like you said...this NOISE almost occurs under every situation.

I updated my BIOS which addressed a BUNCH of issues....I wiped my HD clean and bought a new copy of XP so that I could do a clean install and get rid of a bunch of HP software that might be interferring! I went and bought an extra 512MB of RAM. I ALSO...returned the original DUO in hopes that it was causing the problems..but to no avail...the new one is doing the same thing.

One good thing I got from your post...is that I was almost positive it had something to do with the fact that my soundcard was a USB...I guess I can eliminate that one!

So you say...that the problem just went away and never returned....that is SO weird.

BTW...what kind of Mobo do you have?

THIS SUCKS SO MUCH!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! NO MUSIC!!!!!! AM I IN HELL!!!!!! IS MY NAME JOBE?!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well....I have been searching around the net trying to find out how to fix this problem!!! I noticed that the drivers I am using are BETA....on the M-Audio website they have an older one that is a Release...anyone think maybe I should try the other one....see if it is more stable?!

I have the same problem with my Revo. I have tried quite a few things to fix it, but nothing has had any effect. I have been planning to contact M-Audio, but haven't done it yet.

I think the easiest way I know of, to reproduce it, is this:
1) Play some music in foobar2000 and pause it. Make sure it has a samplerate of 44kHz.
2) Start a video clip in some other player. Make sure the sound in this clip has a samplerate of 48kHz.
3) Cover your ears. (or pause the video as soon as possible)

The problem seems to be relatet to difference in sample rate. It will stop if I pause the video, and will not start again when I press play the second time. It's very annoying when I stumble upon a web page with integrated sound, as they often seems to have a samplerate that triggers this.


EDIT: I think I have tried every driver I could find. I'm running Windows XP w/SP1

Hey North....It happens to me JUST when I am trying to play an MP3....I mean it can play for hours or days straight without messing up...but then BAM! Out of nowhere it happens! I mean if you guys are going through the SAME thing as me....you will know that it is a HORRIBLE experience!

The only thing I can say that is pretty consistant...is that it will happen at the beginning of a song. And it does stop when I hit the stop button. Sometimes I will get a little warning..where it will just mess up a little with a couple pops and clicks or distortion...BEFORE the all out assault!

Hey Krug....have you reinstalled the drivers for the Revo since is started working without error?

I have heard that M-Audio has a lot of issues with their drivers!

I don't know if this is hardware related, software related, or OS related.

On my old Win98 system which has an internal sound card I would get random noise like static, etc., that was very loud, this however didn't happen until I had used the system for several years. It would happen out of nowhere, however rebooting was able to solve the problem. I assume rebooting was resetting the hardware, or reloading a driver that might have failed to load correctly.

One thing I did to know if the problem was active during a session of Windows was to always create a new text document upon startup, then delete it, and then empty the recycle bin. If the recycle bin wave sound file made the static noise I'd know instantly that I'd have to reboot.

KMixer bug, fixed in XP SP2.

Thanks kode54, that is good news.

Sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up but then again who knows maybe it'll disappear for you as well.

I'm using a K7N420D first gen nforce. It would be very interesting if you had an nforce as well...

Also, I'm still not totally convinced this is the exact same problem. Seems very similar but do you have to reboot to get everything working or do you just stop the player and everything resumes upon playback? If so, what about the 96khz method I mentioned? That's one of the biggest wrenches into the works for me, I could never figure out why playing anything but a 96khz stream of noise after the distortion occurred would result in more distortion yet I play the noise and voilà, same as rebooting. Man, I'm almost getting paranoid that this is gonna start happenening to me again and I didn't just imagine it all all those months ago. There hasn't been even one sign of it since but there also were no signs for those first 45 or so days I had the card.



No, I'm still using the same install of 1.0.2.6 that I was using when I was still having these issues. Also, I've "heard" quite the opposite, so as usual I suppose it all depends on the source.

This would imply that using the kernel streaming (if possible) output option (or ASIO) with foobar2k would not have this issue.