I use Winamp and have ripped all my CD's into MP3's using CDEX. I have only listened to the MP3's through Winamp's ML and on my iPod.

Today, for the first time, I listened to a new CD I purchased by putting it into my CD drive and opening Winamp. (Usually I listen to a CD using a CD player). The sound quality playing the CD from the drive in my laptop is terrible. If I rip the CD to the computer and then listen to the MP3, it's perfect. I know it's not a Winamp issue, esp. since the same distortion is there playing the CD using Nero. So the trouble is only when playing an original CD from the CD drive.

Can anyone help with suggestions of what to look at? I am certainly no audio expert and am at a loss.

Thanks!

Reasons why CD playback might have less than optimal quality

• The CD-ROM drive does the CD-DA conversion, and passes analog audio through its cable
  Solution: Use digital playback. Newer versions of Winamp should be able to do this, as can foobar2000.
• The CD-ROM drive is noisy because it spins too fast
  Solution: Limit the drive's speed to 1x or rip the tracks to your HDD, to get rid of the noise.
• Winamp's equalizer treats MP3 and non-MP3 audio differently
  Solution: Stop using it, or disable the "Fast layer 3 EQ" in the MP3 decoder settings.
• You could be imagining things
  Solution: Take it easy. If you really want to make sure there is a real difference, try a blind-test. Preferably a double-blind one.

I don't think it's #3 because it happens through Nero, also. I don't have WMP on this laptop for some reason or I'd try that. I have never used WMP on this computer but just looked for it, but it does not appear to be installed.

I know it's not #4 because it is REALLY bad. Unlistenable kind of bad. Really noisy and distorted.

CD's play fine through Winamp on another computer, so it's definitely this CD drive or this computer's setup.

It could be #1. Double click on the speaker icon in your system tray and bring up the Volume Control. Try lowering the volume of CD audio to lower the playback volume of the analog signal coming from your CD-ROM drive.

If that works, you might want to keep the volume low or you could switch to digital playback.

Lowering the volume did not do anything.

Don't see how to change to digital playback in Winamp. I may have to post on their forums to find out about that.

If even the mute button doesn't work, then you're probably already using digital playback.

If you want to double-check, you can go into Preferences -> Plug-ins -> Input -> Nullsoft CD plug-in -> Configure -> Enable digital audio extraction when possible

The analog playback on nearly all CD-ROM drives is ludicrously bad. Most of them seem to have 12bit or lower DACs (just discarding the four low bits) - one cheap drive I had only had an 8bit integrated DAC with a frequency response of 50Hz - 12kHz. Many modern soundcards make this worse by running the analog signal from the drive through a cheap ADC, mixing in digital and feeding through the output DACs. This wouldn't be a problem if good ADCs and DACs were used, but in many cases these parts are chosen for cost, not quality.

The solution is simple, as kjoonlee said, is to set Winamp to use DAE instead of analog playback from the drive.

The Nullsoft CD plugin IS set to digital. I did look at the properties of the CD drive itself and that is ticked to play back digitally as well.

This is weird. I have never had or used a computer where the CD drive would not play back an audio CD, but works perfectly in all other respects.

As further investigation I wanted to see if an audio CD would play using WMP. I can not find WMP on this laptop. Someone told me that it is impossible not to have WMP as it is part of Windows. That can't be correct can it? I have never used WMP on this laptop, but looked for it and can not see it in the program list or in the Add/Remove programs list in Control Panel. Why would that be?

What happens if you rip tracks to .wav and listen to them with Winamp?

If you want to check if WMP is installed, first click on your "Start" button and choose "Run", or press Win-R to bring up the "Run" dialog.

Type "wmplayer" without the quotes and press enter. If you have newer versions of WMP installed, it should start.

(As a side note, mplayer2 might be available too.)

They play perfectly.

Using the "run" box, this comes up.

"Thank you for choosing WMP10. During installation, WMP will contact a MicroSoft Server in order to determine and set the initial active music service".

I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it!

Permanently block WMP10 with a firewall it and let it try to contact M$ ... it will quit with an error message that will most likely not interfere with your installation.

Ok, I could do this. But, I am not really sure I want or need WMP on the computer. I had considered it only to see if the CD would play correctly through WMP. As I can not listen to music from the CD drive using Winamp or Nero Player, it's probably a waste of time to try WMP. There must be something wrong with the sound set up in my laptop when playing audio CD's.

I am starting to think I will not be able to solve this. I guess it's not that big a deal as I don't really ever NEED to listen to audio CD's from the computer's CD drive. And the drive works just fine for ripping music to my library. It's just an issue that bugs me. Being able to play audio CD's on your computer should be a basic given.

What CD is it? Perhaps there is some horrid copy protection messing with the audio playback on a CD-ROM drive.

It is not any particular CD. It is all CD's. If I play an audio CD on the laptop, the sound is terrible. Warbled, popping, distorted. So bad, I'm not sure I am really describing it properly. The drive works fine otherwise. I can rip into my library using CDEX, (either MP3's or Wav) and those files play fine through Winamp or Nero.

Have you tried lowering the master volume as well?

Are the CDs old? When you try ripping the discs with Exact Audio Copy (EAC), what does it say in the "Pre-Emphasis" column?

edit: Um, oops. I didn't read what you wrote.

Well, have spent a bunch more time trying to figure this out and can not.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

bump

Did you check if digital playback is activated in the drives settings as well?
Sorry, my only idea

If I look at the drive in device manager, it is ticked for digital playback.

The drive works perfectly for ripping to both MP3 and wav, and also for installing programs, but will not play an audio CD for listening. This makes me think it must be the sound card or something. Problem with that idea is that I can listen to my MP3 and wav through Winamp and Nero and they sound great. Any thought on this?

Also, does anyone think it strange or a problem that WMP is not installed on the computer? I don't care as I never use it. But, I have been told that it is part of the operating system and has to be installed. This seems wrong to me as you can change the versions up or down if it is installed. That makes it look to me like a separate, independent program.

I'm not sure how to do this, but maybe it helps.
Did you already try analog output?
Did you try another program? (I don't think thats the thing but hell knows..)
I can't imagine that WMP is important for Cd-playback, if it was important it would be important for more than just that, i guess. Anyway, it's quite strange that it's not installed, I usually try to get rid of that program but never manage to do so

No one has suggested the obvious Occams razor solution-try using a different optical drive on that ide connection. Borrow a know good drive and connect it and see how it plays cds-if all is well with that one-replace the drive.

Yeah, maybe I'll have to think about that. I have been assuming that because the drive works perfectly in every other way, it must be because of something other than the drive itself. I am also a lot less brave about swapping out drives etc. in my laptop than I would be on one of our desktops.

What happens if you burn the EAC-ripped .wav files to a CD-ROM (edit: not as an audio CD but as a data disc) and play the files from the CD-ROM drive?

Good question. I actually rip using CDex, not EAC, but here is what happens. All the MP3's ripped to my computer hard drive play perfectly through Winamp and on my iPod when copied from Winamp to the iPod using ml_iPod. However the original CD will not play correctly from the drive AND MP3 files that play fine on the computer will not play correctly when burned to a CD using Nero and then played in the CD drive.

Go figure??????????

I've had similar problems occur with both of my optical drives (although more for one than the other) at the beginnings of discs, although mainly burnt ones. Try listening to the disc in foobar2000, letting track 1 to start playing, then seeking to the middle of track 1 and letting it play some more, jumping to track 2, and after a little delay, back to track 1. It fixes my problems all the time.

But then again, I'm not an expert, and I don't even know what my solution fixes. It's just an idea I'm throwing out there with the hope that it works

UED77

Could it be related to this? Quoted from the Interesting Results with RMAA (pics attached) thread:

Do you hear any difference when you have your laptop running on "mains" instead of on batteries?

Is the drive in a UDMA mode or a PIO mode? Can you play the CD with EAC using Alternate CD play routines? (found under EAC Options/General).

Never Again: How do I check whether UDMA or PIO?

Kjoonlee: No, it is the same on a/c power. I don't totally understand that other thread, but as my problem is sound SO bad that you can not listen to the CD in the drive, I don't think it is the same thing.


UED77: It is the same played through different players and it is the same where ever I am in a song.

Thanks for the continuing suggestions! I am just happy that I don't really have to use the drive to listen to music as I can rip from it just fine. Otherwise I would be REAL frustrated as I try to get this figured out!

shepard: Regarding UDMA / PIO, goto Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager, then under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, select the channel your CD drive is connected to (Primary or Secondary).
Click Properties and goto Advanced Settings; find your CD drive (master is first, slave is second), change the mode, and see if quality improves.

UED77

UED77 - Maybe this is because this is a laptop, but.... When I go to the controllers, I only have "Intel 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Contollers - 266F" and "Primary IDE channel". There is no secondary channel listed. The primary channnel has two devices, but they are not named or described. It just says "auto detection". Both say "DMA if Available". One is running UDMA, the other PIO. No way to change them?

PIO mode is quite likely your problem. If you only have a primary channel, you can be 99% sure the hard drive is on master, and the CD-ROM is on slave. On my drives, this is the easiest way to tell when the drive goes over to PIO mode, is when CD playback goes terrible.

Windows XP (2000 too) does some error detection on the ATA channels. After (if I remember right) 3 transfer errors in maybe 5 minutes, it switches to PIO mode so it can double check all transfers from there out.

PIO stands for Processed Input / Output. All information from the CD-ROM is fed through the processor first. This is undesirable compared to DMA (Direct Memory Access).

WARNING - Potentially messy fix below (if something goes wrong)

I believe the fix is going to be (presuming this is Windows XP, DO NOT attempt the below on Windows 2000) going into Device manager and deleting the primary channel. Leave the controller itself alone, we only want to delete the primary channel underneath it.

Reboot your computer, the OS should reinstall the channel, reboot again, and see how it goes.

Yes it is XP. I don't really understand your instructions, though. I am tired tonight, so I will re-read them tomorrow.

If the cd drive is slave the option to force DMA is unavailable, grayed out.

Why would I delete the Primary channel if that is the hard drive? Could you post the exact steps to get to the spot to delete the channel, not the controller? Like UED77 did with the>signs>?

Thanks!

I'm sorry, I should have clarified. When XP detects errors and reverts the channel to PIO mode on its own, it locks it that way so that a user (or the auto setting) cannot simply revert back to DMA.

Description of the problem from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/ide-dma.mspx

Microsoft's description of the workaround:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...N-US;817472#kb4

Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager. Find IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, select the primary channel (should be the only channel you have, from your previous post) and uninstall the primary channel. Reboot. Probably reboot again after the computer comes up. If the CD drive channel reverts to PIO mode again, you have a problem.

Ok - Thanks. I get it now and will try this. One further question....

The errors that you refer to that XP detects, can they be the following? Sometimes when I was ripping my older CD's on to the computer using CDex, there would be a series of stutter errors on a track. Once in a great while, a track would have so many, it would not rip and I would then skip it. Would these sorts of errors revert the cd drive to PIO mode? Or are the errors you refer to something else of a different type?

Thanks again for your help!

To my knowledge, they really shouldn't be. They are CRC errors, which should only happen because of problems in data transfer, not because of reads. This is because the drive itself calculates the CRC and sets its value on for whatever particular chunk of data is being sent back to the motherboard. For there to be a mismatch, either the drive is calculating them badly or the data is getting corrupted in transit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check

@shepard
Read errors can, in fact, revert the drive from DMA mode to PIO mode in Windows XP. Usually it takes 6 errors per second, or something like that. When that happens, XP reverts to lower DMA mode (if your drive is using UDMA mode 4, it reverts to UDMA mode 3 and so on until it's in PIO mode).
Here's the official statement from Microsoft about that and the fix for the issue. Be careful, though, because you will need to edit your registry.
Another link to read...

Good luck!

psycho - Thanks for the links. I am now almost certain this is the cause of the problem. What do you think about this "quick" solution offered in the last link you posted. Seems easier than editing the registry manually.

Quote from link:

Quick solution
If you're not interested in the details, but just want to fix this problem as quickly as possible:

Double click here.
Click on the [Open] button to open the program file.
Despite the warning click on the [Execute] button to execute the file resetdma.vbs.
If the program found ATA channels to reset, reboot your computer and test all drives.

You're welcome. I think the Quick solution should work just fine. However, I would recommend reading the last chapter "Desensitize Your Computer's IDE Channels", which links you to the Microsoft page I also gave you. There you can find how to make XP less sensitive to read errors (under MORE INFORMATION), so it will not revert DMA modes based on only a few errors. This almost completely disables XP's ability to revert DMA modes. From this change on, it should only happen with seriously bad drives, that are uncapable of normal operation with DMA turned on. I don't know of such a drive.

EDIT: some info added

Thanks again! This was exactly the problem. I am now back in DMA mode and the sound is perfect! I will do the desensitize thing also and hopefully that will make it difficult for XP to do this in the future.

Hi. first post, so go easy!

I think i have exactly the same issue here, but twofold!

I've been ripping my CD collection to MP3, sharing the load between the two internal drives I have installed - CDRW and DVDRW. I noticed after a while that my CDRW drive was only ripping at 12ish speed vs the 40+ speed it had been doing. But the main issue is that the sound on the CDRW drive, and especially the DVDRW drive, is very jumpy when playing CDs/DVDs real time (ripped MP3s play fine however).

I have a Dell 9150, 320Gb C Drive spread over two 160GB (SATA STRIPE?) disks, and as already mentioned two internal writers (CDRW drive and a DVDRW drive).

Speaking with Dell support their response was "nuke the PC to base config as delivered" which I flatly refused to do!

After reading around via Google this DMA/PIO thing struck me as the likely issue. Sure enough when I go into device manager I see that both devices on the primary IDE channel are running in PIO mode even though "DMA if available" is selected. Note, there is no secondary IDE channel.

I've tried toggling "DMA if available" to "PIO Mode Only", rebooting, then back to "DMA if available" and reboot - no difference. (MS quote this as a possible fix).

Then I tried uninstalling the DVDRW drive, it reinstalls on reboot but it's still stuck in PIO mode.

My next hunch was to uninstall the primary IDE channel but I've chickened out until now because I'm worried if I do that I'll lose the connection to the hard drive. I've seen many warnings saying don't uninstall the channel if your windows OS is running on there! Trouble is, I don't know if it is or not! Question: on the primary IDE channel I see 2 devices which I presume are my DVD and CD drives - hence is the Hard drive not linked via this primary IDE channel, if so I'm presumably safe to uninstall it?

Of course, my other option looks to be to run that neat VB script referenced in one of the links above which looks as if it will work by changing the necessary registry settings. However, I'm a bit concerned by the statement "some Dell computers have DMA disabled in their BIOS by default for the second hard disk". I can't see what mode my hard disks are running in hence if the 2nd hard drive is meant to be in PIO and this script switches it to DMA I'm wondering what effect that will have? But my hunch is that this statement only applies to hard drives configured as, say, C and D?

So, any advice appreciated. I suppost ultimately I'm asking what the least risky thing to do? Run the VB script, or uninstall the primary IDE channel?

I would start a new thread. Posting at the bottom of an old one may not get you as many new looks or as quick help as a new thread.

@TheGrimRipper

I would suggest you check your BIOS settings first. Then, if you are too paranoid, go to safe mode in your Windows XP. You can remove IDE channels there and maybe the controller too. After that, I suggest you read through the links I gave shepard and folow other instructions to desentisize your XP DMA...

Good luck!

Congratulations on refusing to be a sheep and deciding to find out on your own.

Most likely, it is disabled in the BIOS. You may want to go in there and enable it, and then put your opticals each on
a channel of its own. two devices competing on the same IDE channel may be a bottleneck.

You have nothing to worry about it. All you have on that primary IDE is your two opticals, and you cannot have more than two devices on the same IDE channel. Besides, the hard drive on the 9150 is SATA, and will be connected to a controller of its own.

The VB script does its work in Windows registry, it cannot modify BIOS settings; another worry out of your way.

The latter. If the problem occurs again, you can run the script.

Many thanks Never_Again for taking the time to answer my queries. I'll give it a go.

Well, I didn't take your advice... instead I tried the script and... it worked!! Both drives are now Ultra DMA Mode 2 and play CDs and DVDs without skipping. And ripping is now 3 or 4 times faster. This VBScript has now taken pride of place on my desktop for when the inevitable happens again!!

Now, all I need to know is how to make my DVD drive multiregion - it's giving me just 4 chances or something to change region!!

Anyway, thanks immensely guys!!

You'll have to flash the drive's firmware with RPC-1 firmware, and use a player like Media Player Classic most likely.
http://forum.rpc1.org/portal.php for more info.

Thanks Firon, I'll take a look!