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Topic: Sound Card Troubles (Read 1689 times) previous topic - next topic
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Sound Card Troubles

I wasn't sure where to post this problem, since it might and might not be foobar related:

I had downloaded and played some 96khz FLAC encoded song for the first time on my laptop.  It played through a few songs and then, midway through one of the songs, foobar froze and unfroze a few times, skipping along.  Ever since, any audio (not only foobar) that comes out of my laptop is distorted, with clicking, static, skipping, and lots of other badness.  I used my headphones in the headphone jack and that also had problems, so I'm assuming the problem is from the sound card, not the laptop speakers inside.  My sound card came with my Dell laptop e1505; the card is Sigmatel - STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio I think.

I've tried reinstalling the driver, and rebooting a few times, to no avail.  I don't know how to troubleshoot sound card problems, so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!
 

Sound Card Troubles

Reply #1 –
In case anyone cares, after hours of searching, the problem was that the Primary IDE controller reverted to PIO mode, rather than DMA, so everything was dying.  I thought my computer was moving a little bit slow too.  The solutions can be found many placed on google, I like http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/03/lo...h-hardware.html

Which leads to the next question: How did it happen? Microsoft's pages say the automatic reversion from DMA to PIO was caused by, from the Microsoft page:
"After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check (CRC) errors"

What was going on?  I've never listened to FLAC songs at 96khz before, so was the file too big for the harddrive to transfer?  112 MB for a 5minute song....maybe thats it...?