Why is CD playback on my Win2K machine plagued by "popping"?

November 1, 2005 5:57 AM

Why is CD playback on my Win2K machine plagued by "popping"?

I have two optical drives in my machine, one CDRW, one DVD+RW, both of them suffer the same problem when playing audio CDs - the music stutters and pops.
The disturbance is quiet, but noticable. The pops are arhythmic and continuous.

It's not a massive problem, because I rarely listen to CDs through my PC, but it's annoying, it spoils the music and it makes me wonder if the same problem might adversely affect other functions of the drives.

This may well be a common problem, but I seem to be searching with all the wrong words.

posted by NinjaPirate to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Is this popping audible using both speakers and headphones?
From the same audio output (assuming you have more than one audio-out port)
The problem may be in your audio circuits and not your drives.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:01 AM on November 1, 2005

Yes, unfortunately, through both speakers and via headphones when replacing the speaker jack in the soundcard.
It's something internal, although that "something" may the the card itself rather than the OS.
posted by NinjaPirate at 6:08 AM on November 1, 2005

Try going to your Control Panel. Go to "System" and go to the "Hardware" Tab. Click on "Device manager" and look for your DVD/CD drives. Right click and select "Properties".
Look for "Properties" tab again and see if there's a check box talking about "Digital CD Playback". Check or uncheck that and see if it fixes the problem.
posted by FreezBoy at 6:19 AM on November 1, 2005

i had a similar problem, and i got some good responses here.
posted by kev23f at 6:21 AM on November 1, 2005

First question is, are you using digital or analogue playback out of the drive? Go to volume control, click options, properties, tick everything, click ok, and then in the main page mute "CD Player" or similar names. If you can still hear CD playback (with Windows Media Player for instance), it's digital output, which is processed by Windows as "Wave audio". If you can't, it means you're using an analogue cable straight from your cd drive to your sound card, and Windows is not the issue.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 6:24 AM on November 1, 2005

Oh yes, the Ultra DMA thing is a very good idea.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 6:24 AM on November 1, 2005

Yep, Ultra DMA it was. Win2k hides the settings for it under the IDE channel properties so it wasn't an easy option to mess with, but both drives were on channel 2, and now both drives play happily.

Of course I'll probably not play another CD in this machine for the next 3 months, but I'll appreciate it when I do.

Thanks all.
posted by NinjaPirate at 6:40 AM on November 1, 2005