I've been having a few problems playing audio CD's thru winamp. It detects the CD, seems to be playing it correctly and reports a sampling rate of 14H. I was rather suspicious of that rating but found out that it means 1400 kilobits, whereas MP3's usually are only 192kbits. However, no sound. Nothing, complete silence.
Faulty CD? Maybe, so I popped in another one. Yes, after removing the first one. Same results. Tried the windows media player, and that one works fine. For some very strange reason winamp (I'm using 2.91) doesn't like audio CD's anymore. It plays MP3's perfectly though.
So today I got fed up with it and started searching... not much information was found when googling for it, so I headed over to the winamp forums. Apparently I'm not the only one to experience weird behaviour, and the most common suggestion was to install a new CD-reader software tool. Or turn on/off Digital Extraction on the drives. I tried that first, to no avail.
And then I had the excellent idea to take a look in the sound properties... The CD player was muted?! I flicked the switch, opened winamp and voila : SOUND!
Incredible, not? So if you're ever experiencing something like winamp not delivering any sound from audio CD's while it seems to play them fine, whereas windows media player plays them without any problem, look in the audio properties. For some reason windows media player overrules the muted cd audio, and winamp complies with it.
Reason is simple: (At least this is my explantion but of course I may be wrong so don't shoot me if I am)
Windows Media Player reads the CD as raw data and thus the sound is put through the 'wave' channel rather than the 'CD' channel
Whereas Winamp simply uses the analog input from CD-player to your soundcard. This of course causes the sound put thourgh the 'Cd' channel.
I am not sure if there are clear hearable differences between Analog and Digital. I think WinAmp sounds better than Media Player because it uses an automatic Equalizer (you must put it on of course). Another feature of Winamp is the fading at the end of a track and the ability to mix it with the next track. Furthermore I advise to use the yahoo plug in for WinAmp. Shelley gave us a great idea via her plugin advertisment a couple of weeks a go :).
Aha... good explenation Dimi. But I don't use Yahoo, so I don't have any need for a Yahoo plugin I guess :)
Dimi's right. That plug-in thingamy is a cool "toy" lol.
I keep turning the plugin off though cos it puts me as "busy" when I'm not. And that annoys me *nods*. Oh and when I'm listening to dorky music of course.
And see my answer would have been that windows media player doesn't want you to use anything else (it's microsoft after all) so it makes sure you can't. But even without the track fading thing (cos I don't use that) or the equalisers I prefer Winamp cos I have a really cute Garfield skin.
I've got an elftor skin on it :)
Do you find those skins on the winamp site? I suppose a dragon or spyro skin would be too much to ask?? ;)
Nadia : no spyro, but...
http://www.winamp.com/skins/browse.jhtml?categoryName=Anime (winamp3)
For winamp 2.x look here for lots of Movie skins... and anime :
http://classic.winamp.com/skins/browse.jhtml?searchTerm=&categoryName=Movies&offset=0&howMany=20
But Garfield is cuter. :-P