I currently have a computer with a Pentium 3 processor with 850 gHz
processor speed, and 256K RAM. I have a CDRom player and a CD Burner (
2 separate internal units) installed. They both function and play
well. I also have a Sound Blaster Pro sound card installed. Now the
problem---I download alot of music from the internet and store it on
my hard drive (40 gig 7200 rpm Maxtor).The music always has multiple
"glitches" in it if I try to play it back from the hard drive (thru
Klipsch THX powered speakers). However if I burn that same music to a
CD and then play it back thru the system it plays perfectly. ??Can't
figure out why?? Neither can 4 different computer experts??

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Request for Question Clarification by secret901-ga on 04 Aug 2002 11:12 PDT

Do you run any other programs (especially ones that take a lot of
memory) while playing music?  What format are they in?

The answer is likely to be related to the fact that the computer has a
lot of work to do when you play MP3's (or other encoded formats.) It
has to move the data from the hard drive to the processor. There the
data gets decoded (which takes time.) Then it moves again from the
processor to the sound card to be played. All of that has to happen in
real time, or there will be gaps in the music. Try to remove as much
burden from the computer as possible to correct this (Don't run the
fancy graphics with the MP3 player, shut down background programs,
make sure the files are on the fastest drive in your system, keep the
hard drive defragmented, etc...)

When you burn the songs to an Audio CD, the MP3 files get decoded, but
it's not important if it happens in real-time. When playing your newly
burned CD, the hardware in the CD reader is taking care of decoding,
so only the sound card needs to deal with the music. The computer only
has to move data from the CD-ROM to the sound card in this situation
(or not even that if the CD-ROM Drive is directly connected to the
Sound Card.)

If you are talking about burning a CD-ROM full of still-encoded MP3's,
and they play correctly in this situation, I'd say the likely culprit
is a conflict between the hard drive and sound card. They may be
sharing the same IRQ. You can check this in Windows by going to the
Control Panel, selecting System, then Device Manager. You want to view
devices by connection. Select IRQ to see which devices are using which
interrupts.

Your system seems beefy enough to handle decoding MP3's, so I'm
betting it's a hardware conflict. Another way to test this would be to
copy a (small) MP3 to a floppy disk, and try playing it from there. If
this eliminates your glitches, then the problem is almost definitely a
hard drive/sound card conflict.

I hope I've able to explain why your music is acting the way it is,
and feel free to ask for clarifications if these suggestions don't
work for you.

I'm going to have to disgree heartily with googlebrain on this one. On
a P3-850, decoding an mp3 will take less that 2% of the total system
resources (almost assuredly less the 1%). Furthermore, the idea that
his soundcard has an interrupt conflict with his harddrive is
laughable. Consider that a soundblaster pro (and other soundblaster
compatible soundcards) is not capable of using interupts 13 or 14 (IDE
controller interrupts) and you'll see why I'm laughing.

I suspect that bigt99 is burning these audio files to CD in Redbook
format (ie, standard CD-Audio). If this is the case, consider this:

If your soundcard is indeed an original soundblaster Pro, then it is a
very old card. Creative labs produced this card in the early 90's. It
has two 8bit DACs (Digital to Analog Converters, the things that turn
a digital stream that represents audio into voltage differences that
your speakers can present to your eardrums for approval). This is a
design left over from when DAC's were too expensive for most
consumers. It is capable of producing 8bit stereo sound or 16 bit
mono-aural sound.

Now your average mp3 player is going to spit out a 16 bit stereo audio
stream. I suspect that either the driver for the soundcard, or the
soundcard itself is occasionaly making mistakes when downsampling the
audio stream to 8bit stereo. This might be fixed by getting different
drivers for your sound card, but I would suggest simply upgrading to a
new card. (I'm really having a hard time swallowing the fact that
you're using an SB Pro with Klipsh THX speakers... Are you sure it is
an SB Pro?)

googlebrain is close when he states why audio works through your cd
drive. When you play an audio CD from your CD drive, the drive itself
is converting the digital bitstream on the CD into an analog signal
for your speakers (everything except amplification, basically). The
soundcard never really touches this audio stream, it just passes it on
to the speakers, un-touched. So that's why it works when you play it
as a CD. Your soundcard doesn't get a chance to ruin things for you.

Hope this helps; be sure to berate me liberally if this doesn't help.
(:

I have encountered this exact problem in the past. (Hard Drive/Sound
card IRQ conflict) so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

googlebrain: While a PCI plug and play soundcard is capable of
conflicting with a harddrive controller, a SoundBlaster Pro is not.
The SBPro is configured through the use of jumpers on the card. These
jumpers do not allow for a configuration which conflicts with a
standard IDE controller.

I'm not saying it isn't possible for a random soundcard to conflict
with an IDE controller. I'm saying that it is absurd to think that
_this_ soundcard would conflict.

Regards.

well first of all i hope that 256K of RAM origonally stated is really
256MB of RAM.

next i suggest you use winamp 2.8 found at www.winamp.com to open your
mp3s. yes windows media player should also do it.

i've never had a problem with mp3 files not working, unless they are
plainly corrupted