Winamp and Audacity not getting along
 

Basically, 2 issues that are probably related somehow.

First, if Winamp is open and playing something, then I open Audacity, the volume jumps up and gets very distorted.

Second, if I try to record anything (streaming, mp3, etc) using Audacity, I wind up getting what sounds like skips in the recording.

Obviously there could be a million factors influencing either of these, but I've tried so many different things to fix it, with limited results. The one thing that did seem to fix the first issue was disabling hardware acceleration in DirectSound. Obviously that impacts performance, so it's not exactly a good solution. Incidentally, even after a clean boot with nothing else running (basically, just above Safe Mode) it still happens, so it's likely not an issue with too many programs running. I've also done a clean install of both Winamp and Audacity, no change.

If anyone has any tips or notices the same thing, I'd like to hear about it. I think it's just something to do with my particular soundcard and DirectSound not really getting along well, but who knows. Like I said, I've tried countless settings to no avail.

Ok, here are the important facts:

PIII 700
512 RAM
WXP SP2
Philips PSC604 PCI soundcard with latest drivers
Winamp 5.21 Pro
Audacity 1.2.4

Winamp settings:

MPEG Audio Decoder Settings:
Decode Priority = Highest
Full File Buffering = 128
Allow Stereo - Yes
16-bit = Yes
Quality = Full
Equalizer = Logaritmic EQ
Fast Layer 3 EQ - Yes
Streaming Buffer = 128

DirectSound settings:
Device = Philips Wave Device
Allow Hardware Acceleration = Yes
Certified = Yes
Emulated = No
Supports sample rates from = 100 Hz to 100000 Hz (continuous)
Hardware memory = N/A
Hardware mixing = Supported, 16 free streams (17 max)
Speaker setup = Stereo

Audacity settings:
Playback Device = Philips Wave Device
Recording Device = Philips Wave Device
Channels = 1 Mono
Quality = 44100
Default Sample = 32-bit floating