Windows 7 to Make Your Ears Happy

[rigaudio]

My God, you guys are the most anal community of proofreaders I've ever come across.

Anyway, I'm pleased with this news. I make sound effects and music for a living; the more bug fixes for the audio side of things, the better.

 

[alextheblue]

The most common causes of popping and clicking are probably driver issues, followed by IRQ conflicts. Both are *usually* easy fixes. Then there's overloading the PCI bus, but thats becoming a thing of the past. Occasionally I hear people who have problems with certain mainboards and certain audio cards not getting along, some people claim this can be solved by playing with PCI settings.

Then there's noise problems - that's usually more common on cheap onboard sound, and a lot of times muting unused inputs solves it. I've even occasionally heard of people claiming that they had crackling that was solved by putting a heatsink on their audio chip. I have my doubts - I think they probably had an IRQ conflict and stuck their card back in a different slot.

 

[BadKharmaCDN]

Well...it seems that I need to appologize for my forgeting that my caps were on (a work software issue , I'm used to seeing caps) but it also seems as though anyone could read and understand what I wrote. To answer your question ...... I have a few computers that I play with, 4 are running Win7. The one I am using now is P4P800-VM, P4 3 GHz hyperthread enabled, 1GB DDR333 (OEM Dell), BFG FX5700LE 256mb, WD RE3 500GB (the only modern piece in this machine). Yes when I am finished playing/testing with this set-up I will reconfigure and most likely unstall XP PRO and give it to some friend who really only needs a simple computer. My gaming machine currently runs XP but very soon I am going to load Win7 64bit to see what gaming is like in a Win7 world.

 

[michaelahess]

I've reverted back to integrated audio on my current gaming rigs. My X-Fi and Audigy's have been terrible with popping and crackling. No issues with the integrated chips. Last good Creatvie card was the Live! 5.1. My integrated chips can pass 7.1 perfectly to my McIntosh Pre-Amp.

Yes, we have anal proofreaders here, it's called the "educated minority in America."

 

[dtemple]

It's nice to know that Microsoft is revamping its "taksbar" for Win7.

 

[CrisInuyasha]

Maybe it's just me but I never had any problems with sound glitches, in xp and vista.

 

[Guest]

But can it play the audio of crysis?

 

[thuan]

FYI, I use an ASUS Xonar DX with Windows 7 x64, build 7229 and I get cracking audio when hard disc usage is high. It's a Core 2 Duo 8400 with 6GB of RAM and nvidia gefore 9500 gfx card on p43 chipset. Vista runs ok so I do hope that cmedia, asus and MS do it right when Windows 7 is released.

 

[belardo]

Whats so difficult about audio when playing music?

Back in the days of my Amiga, listening to music while doing work (since it did multi-task in the 80s)wasn't a task. Almost 0% CPU use since the computer had dedicated audio and video chips. I always found it rather silly that using a floppy or parallel port on PCs (Win3.x ~XP)on a 300, 800 or 2000mhz system meant the whole computer would come to a halt when my 1985 Amiga could transfer data to a floppy and it wouldn't effect the system at all, even at a lousy 7mhz. Yeah, it doesn't matter now since floppys and parallel printers are dead.

 

[tuannguyen]

Actually, we appreciate everyone who points out the typos. If those people stopped complaining, it means they've stopped caring. Apologies for having the typos there in the first place, but I appreciate the tips.

/ Tuan

 

[pocketdrummer]

Hopefully this will translate to more stability and less surprises and headaches during recording. Clicks and pops are just below the dreaded hum as far as problems in the studio go.

 

[pocketdrummer]

[citation][nom]tuannguyen[/nom]Actually, we appreciate everyone who points out the typos. If those people stopped complaining, it means they've stopped caring. Apologies for having the typos there in the first place, but I appreciate the tips./ Tuan[/citation]

No offense, but why don't you run a spelling/grammar check? Or does it just not catch it? Purely curiosity, not trying to put ya down.

(ironically, firefox caught several typos in what I just wrote, lol.)

 

[tuannguyen]

[citation][nom]pocketdrummer[/nom]No offense, but why don't you run a spelling/grammar check? Or does it just not catch it? Purely curiosity, not trying to put ya down.(ironically, firefox caught several typos in what I just wrote, lol.)[/citation]

The news team tends to type its articles directly into the web-based CMS, which we all use Firefox for. Oddly enough, sometimes Firefox highlights typos and other times it won't. Although we think this more due to a bug in the CMS API we use and not Firefox itself. On the other hand, I just tried to spell something incorrectly here in this response box and Firefox didn't highlight it. :\

/ Tuan

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]Wayoffbase[/nom]Considering that you can use it right now,... yes, it pretty much is. It's not going to do your dishes, make you lunch, or turn your aging budget machine into a supercomputer, but yea it's the best version of windows to date.[/citation]Of course it's the best, but it's still only an incremental improvement over Vista. Some people make it out to be the Holy Grail of OSs.

[citation][nom]tuannguyen[/nom]The news team tends to type its articles directly into the web-based CMS, which we all use Firefox for. Oddly enough, sometimes Firefox highlights typos and other times it won't. Although we think this more due to a bug in the CMS API we use and not Firefox itself. On the other hand, I just tried to spell something incorrectly here in this response box and Firefox didn't highlight it. :\/ Tuan[/citation]Did you right click on the text box and select the "Check Spelling" option"? It's not always enabled by default for every text box for some reason.

 

[zodiacfml]

nice...even though this should not have not been a problem at all.
i experience the sound glitch all the time when playing music on desktop or my laptop whenever there is a sudden system load but i suspect that it happens more often on the slow Vista than XP.

 

[sublifer]

DUH! Thats cuz they've been moving more and more away from hardware based audio processing to software driven audio processing. I haven't heard anything in years on it but I bet most add-in cards don't even do hardware based audio processing... and most people (myself included) use the onboard... who cares? Its good enough for us non-audiophiles... true audiophiles wouldn't be listening to music on a PC anyway.

 

[Guest]

I think it's more Windows Vista,VS XP.
My slower laptop with a tweaked XP does not have audio glitches.
My wife's slightly upgraded laptop, with Vista is one big glitch!
At times the sound from a menu popping up appears 3 seconds after the menu appears!
In fact, at times you could have 2 popups on a notebook, while only hearing one.
When I installed XP on hers she did not experience the glitches at all. Nothing!

But with latest XP3 I have the impression MS wants to degrade performance on XP,so that users will switch to Windows 7!
My HD today hasn't stood still for the past hour and a half, something unthinkable 6 months ago when running the beginning of SP3.

It's getting slow, even with a re-install.
I'm blaming it on MS now!

 

[khaydin]

I have an Auzentech X-Fi Forte PCIe sound card, using Windows 7 i can reliably make it start crackling. I'm using the latest drivers for it and Windows 7 RC1 64-bit. All you need to do is install iTunes, start playing a song and then pause the song. If you leave the song paused for 20-30min while you're doing other stuff like watching something on Hulu you'll get really bad crackling. As long as I don't pause a song I never get crackling.

When I used to use Vista SP1 64-bit before Windows 7 I used to get crackling all the time even if I didn't have an iTunes song paused. It seemed to just come and go as it pleased. A lot of times i would have to switch modes (game, entertainment, or audio creation) to force the crackling to stop.

Now, when I use Windows XP SP3 32-bit I have no problems whatsoever and the sound quality even seems to be better. I've also tried Vista 32-bit and didn't really have problems there either. Seems like Creative(auzentech just re-badges the drivers, maybe modifies a couple things here and there but they're still creative drivers) needs to work on their 64-bit drivers. Either that or the audio system in Vista/7 is garbage. Hopefully they'll fix the problems and work with Creative and other companies to help them make their drivers/hardware more compatible.

 

[royalcrown]

[citation][nom]Wayoffbase[/nom]How old is socket 478? Your's is obviously a situation where you would want to stick with XP. An moldy old OS for moldy old hardware.[/citation]

Yep, his problem is 478 alright, 7 runs fine on the kids ancient emachine @ 2ghz on a 6600gs and a gig of ram...as good as the xp install it replaced.

 

[royalcrown]

[citation][nom]thuan[/nom]FYI, I use an ASUS Xonar DX with Windows 7 x64, build 7229 and I get cracking audio when hard disc usage is high. It's a Core 2 Duo 8400 with 6GB of RAM and nvidia gefore 9500 gfx card on p43 chipset. Vista runs ok so I do hope that cmedia, asus and MS do it right when Windows 7 is released.[/citation]

really ?! I have onboard audio on my EP45-ud3r with NO cracking or glitching,,,maybe your xonar just sucks Tuan ? Try onboard audio...hehe..j/k. Really no probs w onboard at all though.

 

[Guest]

Ive moved to onboard sound as well, i get no pops cracks or anything else. About the only thign that will interrupt my audio is when windows decides it wants to spin up 4 hard drives for no reason at all. Which usually takes longer then audio/video apps buffer data.

Crappy speakers or headphones will also make your audio crap, and i bet that is a large source of complaints with cheap computers.

 

[Guest]

In my previous machine I had Win XP and no glitches, now my Dell Vostro 1400 (with Vista) has LOTS of glitches when listening to music in Winamp, or watching videos in WMP. I think this is a Vista-related issue.

 

[justiceguy216]

s strike strikeout

 

[justiceguy216]

[strike]strike[/strike] [strikeout]strikeout[/strikeout]

 

[justiceguy216]

ignore my posts i was [strike]figuring out how to do something[/strike] being a noob