Hi there, whoever you are.
I'm an enthusiastic, if incompetent lover of PC's and affordable hi-fi audio -- a wannabee geek audiophile. To that end, I've used Media Center for many years (since MC15), mostly for digital music.
At present, I have 3 solid home-built PC's, all running 64-bit versions of Windows. Only one is fully compatible with Windows 10, so I've had to stick with good old Windows 7 on the other two.
Naturally, my main computer is the Win 10 machine. I use one Win 7 PC as a music server, and the other one is set up with it also but seldom used. MC26 was installed on all three.
A few months ago I noticed that if I played tunes long enough on the Win 7-based server, the sound would become garbled badly. Stopping the playback and then starting again corrected the problem for an unpredictable period before the problem recurred. It was not necessary to close and reopen MC26 itself to straighten it out.
Eventually it became obvious that the garbling was a consistent problem. Win 7 had a few minor glitches, so I thought it might be the culprit. I spent a weekend making a new, clean install of Windows and MC26, with a minimum of extraneous programs, but the spurious garbling was still there.
Next, I shifted to the other Win 7 machine and experienced the same problem, so hardware wasn't the issue.
I moved my DAC to the Windows 10 PC and found that the garbling did not occur, after hours of listening. OK, that meant that the combination of Windows 7 and MC26 was at the heart of the matter. I uninstalled MC26 except for the settings etc., and reinstalled the last version of MC25 on the original Win 7 server. Voila! The garbling is gone so far, and as far as I can tell, MC25 is working perfectly.
My conclusion is that MC26 probably has a bug vis-a-vis Windows 7. I thought you would like to know. If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to know. In any event, I hope this helps. I love Media Center!
