Why does "help" suck?!?

[delfuhd]

Ok, I've lived with it for a while, but now I can't take it anymore. On my desktop PC, whenever I put in a CD and play it in Windows Media Player, it keeps skipping and the drive keeps whirring immensley while it skips... I've searched through the help files and online, and can't find a single thing.
I have an IBM pc, 1 gig of RAM, Windows XP pro, enough of everything to be able to play a stupid little CD, but this is annoying me. THanks for any help!

Edit: ah, yes, and this happens with every CD I try to play...

[Janak Parekh]

Sounds like your computer is having issues with digital playback mode. I have two alternative suggestions:

1. Consider using analog mode instead. In WMP, go to Tools => Options => Devices, find your CD drive, go to Properties, and change Playback Mode to Analog. (This assumes you are using WMP9; in WMP8 and earlier, the option is on a separate CD Audio tab, if I remember correctly.) Note that this will work only if your machine has a 4-pin cable running from the CD drive to the sound card; some new machines no longer have this and will produce total silence in this configuration.

2. If you stay with digital playback, make sure your CD drive is running in DMA mode. Go into Device Manager, IDE controllers, find the proper channel the drive exists on (primary or secondary?), go to advanced settings, and make sure the appropriate device is set to "DMA if available".

--janak

[delfuhd]

...I tried both, but it still doesn't fix the skipping.

Does anyone know of any other music player programs that are available? I stopped using Winamp long ago but is that still a decent program to play CD's? I still can't understand what's up though...

[Janak Parekh]

www.quinnware.com

Quintessential CD -- my favorite CD playback program. Not that I play back CDs much anymore -- they're all ripped and encoded first. ;)

--janak

[delfuhd]

No luck, my CD's skip with this program as well! Maybe my CD drives are messed up? I have a Hitachi DVD drive, maybe some epople have heard problems with that drive? Well I guess I'll check the drive...

[Dave Beauvais]

There is another place where "digital playback" is specified which is separate from the Media Player setting. In Device Manager, go to the DVD/CD-ROM drives section and check the properties for the drive in question. On the Properties tab will be another checkbox to enable or disable digital playback. This is on by default on every Win2K and XP box I've installed. Click OK after unchecking it and try your disc again.

If that still doesn't work, I would suspect the drive is defective. Do you have another spare optical drive that you could install to see if the problem remains? Do data CDs and DVDs play fine or do you have issues with them, as well?

[delfuhd]

Well I found the problem. I opened up my computer, and looked inside, and something looked amiss, so I took it to my father, and lo and behold, the first thing he said was "You're missing a wire." Turns out I was missing a CDaudio wire that connected from the drive to the motherboard. thanks for your guys' help though! :mrgreen:

[Janak Parekh]

Just a bit of trivia -- without that wire, you can't play CDs in analog mode, only digital mode. However, some CD drives aren't very good at digital-mode playback. It sounds like that's your configuration. Good to hear you got it to work. :)

--janak