Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 03:26:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matt Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [LIB] Win98/70CT audio playback: A lost cause?
Hey Neil,
Good to hear from you again! Guess it takes a bit of
a challenge to get you 'out of retirement' from the
list these days. ;-P
As usual your feedback is full of great tidbits of
technical information. The DOS approach sounded
enticing there for a while, but the links to mpg123
all seem to be dead. And I did realize just how
dependent I've become on Winamp plugins and Foobar2000
components these days. Things like replaygain that
does an intelligent job of balancing volume when
switching from tracks on one album to another.
Gapless playback for MP3s ripped from CDs with no
pauses between tracks. Lyrics synced to timestamps...
great for translating Latin, Italian and German in
classical performances... though work. Nice library
GUIs for searching digital audio files, creating
playlists and general file management.
I haven't thought of checking to see if FB2K is
available in a version for Linux. Seems those folks
over at Hydrogen do an awful lot of work at the
command prompt. As it turned out, I was never able to
get that tweaked version of Mandrake with the iceman
shell you were working with me on to play MP3s to the
point where they needed less system resources than
Win98 on the L50. Can't even remember if I tried it
on the L70... but I don't think so. Maybe an idea
there.
I really like the idea of sticking with the smaller
50/70 profile for toting around a multi-purpose system
I can listen to MP3s on. At some point I >will< get
those LiIon cells from SabicOceana and pump up the
smaller battery pack up (along with the fatter pack,
tho’ I like keeping the Libby as tiny as possible).
And with this great TDK sound card David turned me
onto I snatched for $20 off Ebay, the audio coming
through the L70 is sounding reasonably good these
days. Though there is that little soap-on-a-rope
breakout box hanging off the PC card. Wish the Echo
Indigo I/O would run on Win98 instead of requiring
Win2K/XP so I could use it with the L70. Audio cables
plug right into the fat end of its PC card. But then
I am toying with the idea of trying 2000lite after
that success of mine at using the free version of
98Lite to solve the TDK recording problem. If
2000lite can work well enough on the L70 to power the
Echo, that’d be really slick.
Well... back to the topic on hand. I notice there
hasn’t been any flood of interest in trying out the
test I proposed. If a couple people wrote in telling
me they were able to get Winamp, WMP or FB2K to play
MP3s for an hour or more without playback developing
serious clicking problems, I’d be encouraged. But it
seems there’s never been that much interest in audio
on this list. Wonder about the Yahoo lib list Pres
defected to.
But yeah... the clicks that develop on my 50 & 70 are
fairly significant. Not those faint little ones that
develop with some problems. This reaches right to the
edge of full fledged motorboating. And I’m pretty
sure it’s more a hardware problem than software,
though without a doubt it’s a degree of both what with
dance they’re doing. Here’s what makes me think that.
I’ve had the 70 dual-booting ever since I set up a
small partition for 98Lite. Rather than boot into
98Lite, I’ve been just booting normally to win98SE, or
remaining here after work, and playing Winamp from
there. After 45-60 minutes when the clicking starts,
I’ve tried booting into 98Lite, thinking if the broken
up audio problem recording was resolve there, this
clicking problem should be too. But no. On an
immediate reboot into 98Lite, Winamp still clicks. A
5-10 cool off period solves the problem for another
hour or so.
I guess if might be a bit more of a test to try a
totally different OS... though Linux is really the
only thing available to me at this point, and my head
throbs just thinking about it. I’m just not savvy
enough to deal with Linux (Leenoox... thank you
Linus). .I do have a copy of Win2000 now. I’ll give
the free copy of 2000lite a go.
Then there’s the heat issue. Although the specs for
the 20GB and 40GB HDDs I’ve upgraded to didn’t show
what seemed a significant increase in heat generation,
I had been wondering if that may in fact be a
contributing problem at this point. But I pulled out
my original old 750MB HDD, plugged it in the L50,
loaded up Win98SE, and ran 98Lite on it. But after
45-60 minutes the clicks ensued. I suppose I really
ought to try it on the L70 though.
>but once you add W95/8 and directSound
Hmm... I thought directSound required one of the
newer Pentium CPUs and W2K/XP to operate. Seems at
some point the people over at Hydrogen told me it
wouldn’t fly on these Libbys.
> I found when I was running the 70, which I had
> overclocked IIRC, that most of the audio programs
> couldn't hack it.
So are you saying that you never got your 70 to play
audio reasonably accurately?
I’d forgotten how annoying audio playback on the 100
is through its cheap Yamaha chip. Unlike the 50 an
70, the HDD LED blinks annoyingly during audio
playback. And the darned sound chip leaks the
generated noise right through to the audio output. It
was the 1st thing I noticed firing up Winamp after a
fresh W98SE installation. I grabbed the TDK and
whooosh... no more tick... tick... tick... anymore.
And the audio quality through headphones is so much
more alive. Wonder what the difference in sound
quality would be between it and the Echo... and what
the Echo with a decent set of headphones would sound
like.
Well... I’d better go back to work and make and start
making bit more dinero before anything else.. The
good economic times of the 90s are long gone, so the
long vacation is over. My finances are just not
making it anymore.
...sigh
Matt
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
