I'm running Win98 SE on a AOpen mobo with a VIA chipset and Pentium 1ghz cpu and have been having problems from about 239 onward. Its really nice to say that with MJ293 and my new Audiophile 2496 soundcard these problems have vanished. Its has been quite a process and I am writting this for other MJ users who may be having problems with MJ and feel that they can be solely blamed on MJ.
At one point the only way I could get MJ to play was to open the program and toggle the current skin state, for the rest of the current windows session MJ would play without a hitch. At that point in time I had a SB Live 5.1 soundcard installed, combined with the fact that I had a VIA chipset this lead JimH to focus on the SB drivers and/or VIA chipset as the problem. After much back and forth I decided bite the bullet and reinstall Windows and follow AOpens recommended procedure for installing the VIA drivers. As I had already decided that the SB 5.1 did not meet my needs when it came to ripping vinyl LPs I enabled the onboard sound and pulled the SB out of my system. Nothing changed, the problem with starting MJ persisted and in a few versions the skin/unskin trick would not even work.
In my first setup, with the SB installed I had had occasion to contact eMusic and suggest that some of their MP3s from Fantasy/Prestige were sub-standard. Using the onboard sound with the AC97 codec, the same codec that the SB Live uses, I found very little difference in the sound quality, to be fair the onboard sound was a little hollow compared to the Sb but apart from that there was no difference. Except that the 'bad' tracks I had complained about to eMusic didn't sound quite a bad, there was a metalic swishing effect to the hi-hats that was somewhat reduced with the onboard sound.
Somewhere around MJ269/272 my startup problems disappeared, gone, vanished. Obviously, the developers had changed or fixed something, who knows what and in response to what, point is it was gone. Also a note here about the reinstall while it did not fix the problem with MJ other system irritations did disappear. My system now runs faster and the suspend/resume is much less problematic. I mention this because I have no way of knowing, apart from going back to the old setup (not going to happen!), if the changes which were made to the program around version 269 would have fixed my startup problem.
So at this point MJ is much more stable but I notice that if I switch tracks manually there a lot of hiccuping going on and I can here residual sounds from the current track when the new track starts. In addition there is a really annoying click about 2 seconds before a track ends, this is about version 289. Enter 293 and the track changing is much improved, though not perfect, but the end of track clicking persists. I also noticed that when I was downloading from the internet, the sound in MJ would quite often start stuttering, uh oh? No. when I rebuilt my system I added a second hardrive to give more room for music files and be able to do quick system backups with Ghost (I never want to go thru the pain of a full system rebuild again, if I can possibly avoid it). Relevance? It occured to me that with all this shuffling back and forth of files, ripping and encoding that maybe my drives were getting a little fragmented. Gee I wonder if this could be affecting the playback in MJ? Listening to: 'Remembering Machgara' from 'Roots & Sprouts' by 'Rabih Abou-Khalil' on Media Jukebox, downloading 4 files and uploading 5, no stuttering detected, oh yeah!
On Friday my new sound card, an Audiophile 2496, arrived so I spent a day learning some of the ins and outs of audio cards trying to wrap my old head around software patch bays and routers. A bit of a learning curve and worth twice the effort and the $180 US it cost. The sound is like night and day, I use a circa 1978 Marantz receiver, a Technics turntable and (you can laugh or sneer as you like) a pair of Radioshack Minimus7 speakers for my computer sound system. With the SB Live when I tried to do LP rips toggling between the TAPE IN (from the sound card) and PHONO inputs on the receiver showed the computer source was muddy, hissy, and definitely lacking in the upper frequencies compared to the direct turntable sound. With the Audiophile I cannot distinguish between the two sources! Maybe when I move my system and have the room to connect my PSB Alphas I'll be able to to hear a difference but I suspect there will still be little if any change between the original and the audio card sounds.
So earlier this evenning friends came over for our semi-weekly card game and after we sat listening and sharing old songs and old times while we had our cake and coffee. They couldn't beleive the sound and neither could I because it suddenly dawned on me that the end of track clicking had disappeared. After they left I did some experimenting and these are the results. If I turn off the DFX plugin, I can jump back and forth between tracks with no hiccups, burps or pops. With DFX on the transitions are not quite as smoth but still acceptable and as mentioned the end of track clicks are gone DFX or no DFX.
As for the drum material that I contacted eMusic about it now sounds like a poor recording whether its from the original material or the encoding process I don't know. My point here is that when I had the SB installed there were some tracks that I downloaded from eMusic that sounded really good for 128kbit MP3s (some of the Riverside? Bill Evans material) but the Booker Erwin material from Fantasy/Prestige sounded terrible. So I assumed it had to be the encoding process that was to blame. But when I changed to the onboard AC97 sound the Erwin tracks sounded a bit better and now with the Audiophile on board it sounds like the drums were poorly recorded but there is no distortion per se.
And the point of this very long post?
MJ may be the best media player out there but I can't comment on this because I haven't tried every media player that's out there and further more I have no inclination to try other players.
MJ's total integration, database features and encoding/decoding support are awesome. Is it perfect? no. Have I got a wish list, you bet! Have I felt that problems I was experiencing were not being given the attention they deserved? yep! But it is clear to me that the J River team are dedicated to making the best player they can make and that goood things are worth the wait.
Congratulation the the team!
And my last point the joy I feel Listening to: 'Raga Bilashkani Todi' from 'Ragas' by 'Ravi Shankar' on Media Jukebox is what it always was and will be about.
Take care.
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Topic: MJ293 - playback, DFX, Audiophile 2496!, Drivers, Codecs and other stuff. (Read 759 times)