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OT: But need help!
My Windowns Media PLayer appears to have gone south. Whenever it plays any audio file the sound is terrible. Sounds mushy and like its overdriven. Thouht it was my speakers but had same problem after changing speakers. Then thought maybe it was my TurtleBeach audio card but then I discovered that the sound files sounded great when played with Real Player – so must not be the sound card, right? I had WMP 11. Since I found it was IMPOSSIBLE to totally remove or uninstall WMP I was able to roll it back to WMP 10 by unintalling 11. (BTW the sound had been working perfectly well under both 10 and 11 previously) and it still sounded terrible. Now I am down to my minimum WMP 10. Nothing to roll further back to. I tried a system restore to before the problem occurred but for some reason my computer will not take the restore. (Dell XP S2 1.8 with 1G ram) I do not like Real but am I stuck with it as my default now? Anybody else have this problem or any ideas for me.
Vegas still seems to work fine on this computer for me – so far.
Thanks for any help. -
5 Replies
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Sounds like one of the media drivers has gotten corrupt.
Try re-installing WMP 10 (or 11)
Jeremy
MJ Productions
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I tried reinstalling 11 but it didn’t help. I’m now back to 10 (which doesn’t work). I will try reinstalling 10 over the top of 10 which is the only way you can do it since they won’t let you totally uninstall 10 to get a clean reinstall.
Thanks for the thoughts. -
have you tried turning down the volume slider in wmp? I sometimes get distortion if that’s up to high, so I just tweak that down a ways and turn up the speakers to compensate.
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Didn’t help. Thanks for the idea.
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Have you recently installed any “codec packs” or anything like that? Often times those can install a bunch of useless, unnecessary, pirated or otherwise inadvisable codecs on your system, as well as screwing up the associations and DirectShow playback. If you have installed one of these, nuke it posthaste and start fresh. If you absolutely *need* a codec pack for MPEG4, ogg and other “common” formats, I would recommend ONLY using one called ffdshow, as it is open-source and will not screw things up so badly.
You can also try another free media player that is WORLDS better than Real – use Winamp (winamp.com). See if playback is also screwed up with that, and you may be able to sleuth out the problem a little better. If it still only does it in WMP, you’ve got something corrupted pretty good, and you may need to start poking in your DirectShow outputs chain to see what WMP is using to play media that Real isn’t.
Also try running the DirectX diagnostic called didiag.exe. Drop to a command prompt or go to the Run.. button in the start menu, and type “dxdiag” and hit enter. In the program that starts, go to the Sound tab and there should be a big button that says “Test DirectSound.” Run through those tests and see what you get. It may report that it finds an audio problem at a system level.
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