Handling Audio with Windows Vista - Fix Garbled Music
(Page 2 of 4 )
Your music not sounding its best? The most likely candidate is an “enhancement” in your music player; sometimes these just don’t play nice with Vista’s audio drivers.
In Windows Media Player, press the Alt key to open the menu, and select View ➝ Enhancements ➝ Graphic Equalizer. In the Enhancements pane that appears, click the Turn off link that appears (if the link says Turn On, the equalizer is already turned off). Next, return to the Enhancements menu, select SRS WOW Effects, and click the Turn off link there as well.
If you’re having this problem in iTunes, select View ➝ Show Equalizer, and clear the checkbox next to the On option. Next, select Edit ➝ Preferences, choose the Playback tab, and turn off the Sound Enhancer option. Click OK when you’re done.
Or, in WinAmp, select Options ➝ Equalizer, and if there’s a checkbox next to EQ enabled, turn it off.
Whether or not this adjustment fixes the problem, this is not a problem a fully functional sound card should have. Make sure you have the latest drivers, and consider replacing the card if nothing else seems to work.
Crossfade Your Music
Crossfading is a feature present in Windows Media Player and other music players that eliminates the gaps between songs by gradually overlapping adjacent tracks. (Radio DJs do this, but they undoubtedly have better equipment than you do.) To enable crossfading, open Windows Media Player, go to View ➝ Enhancements ➝ Crossfading and Auto Volume Leveling. On the Enhancements pane that appears, click the Turn on Crossfading link (Figure 4-12), and then adjust the amount of overlap to your liking.
Figure 4-12. Crossfading, which overlaps songs to reduce dead air, works only in certain circumstances
Crossfading only works on data files (such as MP3 or WMA), and then only when the two songs are encoded with the same sampling rate (e.g., 192 Kbps or 256 Kbps). Crossfades won’t work if you are playing an ordinary audio CD, or, for some reason, a data CD that was originally burned with Windows Media Player.
Now, it’s possible that crossfading is actually working, but you can’t tell because your music files have more than a few seconds of silence at the beginning or end. To test the feature, try playing a few songs that don’t begin or end in a fade. And try increasing the amount of overlap by moving the crossfade slider to the right.
To enable crossfading in iTunes (which, ironically, is not something you can do with an iPod), select Edit ➝ Preferences, choose the Playback tab, and turn on the Crossfade playback option.
Crossfading is really annoying when you’re listening to spoken-word tracks or dialog from movie soundtracks. Try it; you’ll see what I mean.
Next: Extract Sound from Video >>
More BrainDump Articles
More By O'Reilly Media
|
 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks for the Cranky Consumer, written by David A. Karp (O'Reilly, 2008; ISBN: 0596527624). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
|
|
/ 2 
