As a lot of you know, all AC97-compliant soundcards work internally at 48kHz, while most audio files are 44.1kHz. Therefor, the soundcard always has to resample the audio signal to 48kHz.
The problem is that a lot of soundcards have a rather bad resampling quality (onboard AC97 codecs, SBLive!, etc).
A possible solution to this problem is using high-quality software resampling algorithms to do this conversion, bypassing the hardware. Shibatch's SSRC code is generally known to be of a high quality:
http://shibatch.sourceforge.netNow there's a very interesting Winamp plugin that uses these SSRC algorithms to resample the audio
during playback:
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/out_wave.zipI'll quote a part from the readme file:
out_wave_ssrc has built-in SSRC resampler; it's intended for sblive/audigy/ac97 and similar hardware. most of recent consumer soundcards have fixed 48000hz output samplerate, forcing any sound input other than 48000hz (eg. all mp3s ripped from CDs are 44100hz) to be resampled by either hardware (sblive/audigy series) or software / windows kernel mixer (all the AC97). quality of used resamplers is relatively bad in both cases; out_wave_ssrc uses its own ultra-high-quality resampler to produce 48000hz output and bypass resampling in soundcard drivers/hardware, giving better audio quality on hardware mentioned above. DO NOT use out_wave_ssrc on soundcards that do not resample themselves (eg. sb128 and older soundblasters), if you do so, sound quality will suffer; also, SSRC resampling is still relatively slow, out_wave_ssrc will require much more CPU power than any regular output plugin.
As this part already mentions, the drawback is increased CPU utilization. It's up to the user to choose the tradeoff.
Now to the point: I would really like it if this kind of high quality software resampling would be incorporated in MJ. I don't really need it at home, because I have a Santa Cruz soundcard that already has a very good resampling quality, but as a contract programmer I regularly have to switch PCs at work, and I mostly work - and listen to music - at systems which have a poor onboard audio chipset.
Listening to: 'Bachelorette' from 'Homogenic' by 'Björk' on Media Jukebox