Now I Hear It; Now I Don't

December 19, 2008 11:56 AM

I listen to an MP3 and it sounds just fine. I listen to the exact same MP3 another time on the same system and it sounds all distorted. What's going on here?

I've noticed this phenomenon on several different Wintel systems over the years, and with several different media players. Changing the media player and speaker levels doesn't make a difference.

Am I completely nuts?

posted by ZenMasterThis to technology (4 comments total)

Without more details, it will be difficult to determine if you are completely nuts.

How does it sound distorted? By "changing the media player and speaker levels doesn't make a difference," do you mean that the song is still distorted?

Once it is distorted, is it always distorted?
posted by Pants! at 12:07 PM on December 19, 2008

Media playing software is still software, and it can have performance hiccups. Likewise the layers below, down into Windows itself. Many things can cause MP3s to play back poorly, or sound "jittery", but I've only seen it happen on machines that were very overloaded, short of memory, processor choked or otherwise barely-working for a few seconds.

At the times this happens, is there anything else different on the computer? Are virus scans running sometimes, and not other times? Are there many open applications, especially things like games that tend to suck resources and use sound? Are there YouTube videos or Flash movies also running?

In other words, is there any relationship between the "busy-ness" of the computer and the times when this problem occurs?
posted by rokusan at 12:11 PM on December 19, 2008

My main system runs a server-based version of Windows. Whenever it gets "busy" doing heavy CPU, disk or network tasks WinAMP begins to chug and I get distortion.
posted by jkaczor at 12:22 PM on December 19, 2008

This is actually more likely to be an issue on server versions of the OS (not just Windows, most server-tuned OS's will show the same behaviour) because these tend to be tuned more for total throughput than for real-time responsiveness, and often run much coarser time slices.
posted by flabdablet at 3:39 PM on December 19, 2008