How do I stop mp3s sticking like scratched vinyl records?

December 2, 2008 1:20 PM

Really strange mp3 playback problem, music "sticking" like a scratched vinyl record on a vista pc using 2 different media player programs, Itunes and Mediamokey. I am baffled, can anyone suggest a fix?

A friend's vista ultimate pc (fully updated) has both Mediamonkey and Itunes installed and a very large (65,000 song) library. Playback is fine for a couple of hours and then a random song will "stick" like a scratched vinyl (repeating samll section over and over and over until program is stopped and restarted). The library is on a pretty new (under 1 year) 1tb Samsung hard drive and the pc is not ever worked hard, really only used for web browsing and mp3 playback. It has CCCP installed as codec pack and a Realtek onboard soundcard on an Ausu P5B motherboard. I have tried using Graphedit to check what is being used to decode mp3 and changed to a different codec but still same issue after couple of hours. This problem is driving me insane! Can anyone help me with some suggestions as to what I can do to fix? I have been through Google and various forums with no luck...Help!!

posted by mrbenn to computers & internet (6 comments total)

When you close the media player, can you do it through the program itself or do you end up having to kill it through the task manager? Does the event viewer (under administrative tools) give you any clues?

Also, is the music HD an internal or external? If it's external it may be disconnecting and reconnecting quickly. I had the same problem with Media Monkey that you are having. The skipping music occured whenever a USB device was removed (although it's probably not the root of your problem. For me it would skip for a few seconds and then correct itself).
posted by Dr-Baa at 1:58 PM on December 2, 2008

This sounds more like a problem with the sound card drivers or something else preventing data from getting to the sound card in a timely manner. When there isn't enough data being fed in, the playback buffer will repeat. I'd try updating the sound card driver or maybe trying a different sound card.
posted by zsazsa at 2:14 PM on December 2, 2008

Yeah sounds like drivers to me. Some tests you could try include using a USB sound adaptor, booting from a Linux live CD and playing under there, or downgrading/upgrading the driver. You're going to need to do more elimination of possible issues which is unfortunate since it takes hours to reproduce the issue.

Good luck!
posted by chairface at 2:32 PM on December 2, 2008

Is this with the same songs or album? I've downloaded some music - yes illegally - from some sites that had been purposely altered, scratch noise skipping sound sped up vocals etc.
posted by pianomover at 2:33 PM on December 2, 2008

Could be some background processing thats hogging disk or CPU at the time its skipping. Indexing/defrag/backup?
posted by wongcorgi at 3:30 PM on December 2, 2008

What wongcorgi said, or possibly some bad RAM. Maybe an overheating condition?
posted by gjc at 6:01 PM on December 2, 2008