My media players have all got problems - but different problems

July 13, 2007 5:22 AM

Weird computer video/audio problems across all my media players

I have various audiovisual problems going on

Winamp: When I listen to music (mp3, flac) there is some strange distortion noise underneath the playing music. The distortion starts when I press play and stops when I press stop but it is universal to everything I play in winamp, whatever filetype, whichever disc drive.

iTunes: But when I play the same file in iTunes, they don't have the distortion, instead they skip and hiccup, as though on a dirty CD.

VLC: When I watch films on VLC the sound does the same thing as Winamp, but on top of that, the sync goes absolutely all over the place. There are no error messages (in that message box) saying that anything is wrong.

WMP: The sound tends to be OK with WMP, but the sync is all over the place as well. I can play mp3s though, but not flac because I couldn't get the plugin to work.

These have all started recently (within the last month). I have downloaded the latest Winamp and VLC to no effect and iTunes was d/l six months ago or so. I have p4/2Ghz/512ram/2internal DD, 1external DD/XPsp2

posted by criticalbill to technology (6 comments total)

The distortion sound is a sort of digital wind. It has no relation to whats going on in the track.
posted by criticalbill at 5:23 AM on July 13, 2007

Check your memory, both the hardware and usage of.
posted by tmcw at 5:26 AM on July 13, 2007

A very, very broken clock once gave me audio distortions similar to the ones you describe.
posted by uandt at 5:36 AM on July 13, 2007

Check your CPU usage as well.
posted by panic at 6:10 AM on July 13, 2007

Thanks for your answers. Incidentally I actually have 1G Ram not 512

Check your memory how? I tried that mem86 thing but I haven't got a floppy disc and couldn't see how to work it otherwise... The ram usage is around 46% according to some program i have got, and doesnt seem to rise too much when i play vlc or winamp... but i don't really know what i am doing

Broken clock? don't know nothing about this

CPU is not maxxing out at all
posted by criticalbill at 6:20 AM on July 13, 2007

Broken clock as in clock running 50 % too fast. If your computer is keeping time you probably don't have to worry.

Boot your computer with something like an ubuntu live cd. You can make a memory check with the cd and if things work well under ubuntu you can bee pretty sure your problems are software and not hardware related.
posted by uandt at 9:26 AM on July 13, 2007