So, my wife reports this odd problem to me - she doesn't hear any audio from her Yahoo news clips. Odd, I think - try a different clip. No good. Hmmm....I open up Foobar and pick a tune at random...plays fine. Try a different news vid? Still no good. Try a locally saved MPG file? Odd....no audio? Try the speaker 'channel' test in the Audigy 2 control panel.....no audio! Open up Foobar again....plays fine.

Bizarre?

Try rebooting PC. Suddenly, MPG audio works, Yahoo clips work, etc. But I'm not happy with this. Fire up Foobar again and surf the net for half an hour while listening to music. No audio problems, nothing seems amiss, close it down and go to try and play an MPG again....no sound. Creative channel test? No sound. Check task manager (making sure to verify tasks from all users are displayed) - nope, no instance of foobar2000.exe running. Fire it up again and....it plays fine! MPGs? Nope, still broken.

(Windows shutting down to reboot again? No sound!)

Booting back up, and sound is working again. Open up Foobar, close it...sound still working. Open up Foobar, play a single song, close it....sound still working everywhere. Open up Foobar, play 10 minutes of music...close it....nope, sound broken everywhere else, now. Can still open up Foobar and play music, but NOTHING else works. Not even the 'DXDiag' DirectSound tests pass!

Reboot PC again...everything fine, DXDiag runs fine. This is odd, so I fire up WinAMP with plugins to get me surround sound and FLAC file playback. Roll along for an hour or so....no problems anywhere.

Something wrong with DirectSound? Loop 3dMark03's "60 sound test" for 30 minutes. No problems in any other application. Something wrong with Creative drivers? Update to latest Betas (was on latest WHQL drivers already)....nope, no difference. Foobar still seizes control of the DirectSound device after some period of time.

Clean install of Foobar with NO plugins or configuration settings (other than below) done? Nope, same problem.

Details:
Foobar 0.8.3 using 24bit fixed-point output (also tried 16-bit and 32-bit), soft ATH noise shaping (tried 'strong' and disabled).

DSPs loaded:
Volume Control -> Channel Mixer (also tried 'convert stereo to 4 channels', and tried without) -> Resampler (PPHS) (also tried without) -> Advanced Limiter

Resampler PPHS set to 48khz when used.

Output:
waveOut - no issues I could find in testing, but...well, I do not like
DirectSound, DirectSound 2.0 - issues as desribed above (both identical, near as I can tell)
Kernel streaming - plays fine for 2-3 minutes, then stops. Won't play any files, then. Can change output method to any other type, and it plays, but changing back to kernel streaming, and no good.

System:
Athlon64 X2 '4200+'
Jetway A210GDMS-Pro ATI Xpress200/RS480 motherboard
ATI Radeon X800XL 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E (438/1146)
1gb (512mb x 2) OCZ Gold Rev 2 PC4000 (2.5-3-3-10) @ DDR466
Audigy 2zs Platinum

Partial solution:

- Removed Audigy from system entirely, using onboard 'Azalia' audio - *poof*, everything is working. Didn't even change any Foobar settings.

- Put Audigy back IN system to give the X-Fi drivers a try...installs okay...running along and....no, crap, same thing

- Try the 'kx drivers' for the Audigy 2. Sucks that I lose EAX support, but...hot damn, they work fine!

Side issues:

- Audigy 2 previously would ALWAYS BSOD on starting to play a DVD-Audio disk in MediaSource DVD-Audio player. The ONLY BSODs I'd even seen in WinXP. Lovely. Non-issue with the kx drivers, of course, as MediaSource sees no Soundblaster drivers and won't let me do squat.

- When the system audio DID stop working (as above), it wasn't just the audio that stopped working - my integrated network adapter did, too! Repeated tests verify this isn't just a coincedence....with the audio gone so that nothing but Foobar can play anything, there is no network connection to this PC. The adapter shows up fine, settings are all correct on it, I can ping the loopback address fine....but it's completely useless. No packets are sent or received from it, and even trying to use WinXP's "repair" function on it does nothing. Disabling it and re-enabling it does nothing (it can't even renew its IP address when re-enabled). Reboot, and everything - EVERYTHING - is back to normal.

Again, though, not a problem with the kx drivers...just the Creative ones.

For reference, the Creative drivers I've tried:
- Retail CD drivers
- Latest WHQL drivers
- Latest Beta drivers
- X-Fi drivers

All had the exact same effect.

As far as i know, creative labs is not unknown for crappy drivers. Of course, if the only solution is to loose EAX, then one can als well buy a soundcard from a manufacturer which offers more for the money, since game-compatibility is pretty much the only advantage of creative labs cards.

edit: you could also try to use a different output-method to see if that circumvents the problem.

Yup, my thinking. So, today and tomorrow I'll probably try fussing around with the Creative drivers again. I really do listen to a LOT more music than gaming on this system, but, still.....it's an important part of this system's usage! Quality vs quantity and all.

It has occurred to me more than once that the kx drivers have literally NO EAX support. I get positional audio in games, still - they handle DirectSound3D and Aureal 3d okay. Still, even my integrated 'Azalia' audio does EAX1 and EAX2. Any Envy24 add-on card I could find would offer EAX1 and EAX2, as well.

Only downside to that is that I have an Audigy 2zs Platinum and I REALLY like that drive bay. Front panel audio connections are EXTREMELY important to me. (And a pet peeve of mine in the 'Azalia' integrated audio - aside from how it mushes together elements of the soundstage - is that the front panel audio connectors do NOT mute the speakers when headphones are plugged in!)

FWIW, I'm thinking about that Chaintech AV-710 again. I know the front panel connectors on that work (and they mute properly when speakers are plugged int)....it's just....I have a surround sound system (as noted above), and it only has 16-bit/48-khz DACs on all but two channels at a time. OTOH, I'd get EAX1 and EAX2 back....and the drivers don't suck.

Hrm. Well, we'll see from today's testing how things go.....

If you can live without EAX, then the KX-drivers are really good for making changes for the way the front-panel inputs are routed. You can mix them togehter, att hardware effects (from the dsp-card on the soundcard, like chorus and reverb), then rout it to any asio-bus, and then to the output.
Just try them, and try changing the dsp. The possibilities with these drivers are endless.

Why not just use waveOut for foobar2000? I don't think "but...well, I do not like" is a good enough reason to shun a solution that solves your problem.

So what would you guys say is the best soundcard out there at the moment?

Been pretty happy with my Audigy 2ZS. Never had a problem with it (knocks on wood) and the X-Fi looks pretty good. A non-creative card that I had as well, and really enjoyed, was the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

There is no "the best". Only a "the best for your needs"(which we do not know). For knowing which is the most *popular* soundcard, you could just start a poll - which will tell you as much as the replies which you will get for your question. It may make more sense to start a new topic for this, since this has nothing to do with the topic.

did you enable "allow hardware mixing" in the Direct Sound ouput options?

if yes, try disabling it. that helped me fixing a similar problem where foobar was eating up all hardware buffers...