difference between DirectSound and WaveOut

[maiki60fps]

ASUS P5GPL-X SE with ADI 1986A High Definition Audio

If using WaveOut v2.1(d) instead of DirectSound v2.46(d) - do I lose something in terms of audio quality?

I cannot use direct sound output because of this: when I play a track and I press pauze and then play button, there is just noise, then I press pauze and play again and it plays fine, and so on, so every second time after pauze, there is just noise.. It has nothing to do with Winamp itself as other players such as Foobar2000 do the same. So it seems something is wrong with AD1986A XP drivers. Apparently there is just one version for XP.

[DJ Egg]

DirectSound Output is recommended on Win2k/XP.
WaveOut is mainly there for Win9x legacy support.

The main benefits of DirectSound are support for multi-speaker output (with 'allow hardware acceleration' enabled), crossfading, and silence removal (for gapless playback).

The differences are outlined here in these old threads:

The difference between WaveOut & DirectSound
1) http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=67427
2) http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=73197
3) http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=74611
4) http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=32369

If I was to hazard a guess... maybe you've enabled the 'Allow 24bit' option in Winamp > Prefs > Playback, but your onboard sound chip only only supports a single 24bit audio stream.

If that's the case, then you can either uncheck 'Allow 24bit'
or you can go to: Prefs > Plugins > Output > DirectSound > Config > Fading tab
and disable all fades (including fade on seek and on stop/pause).

If it's not that, then yeah, it'll be sound driver related, but I'm not sure what/why.

[maiki60fps]

the case was probably broken XP drivers... I disabled HW accelaration in DirectSound and it now works perfect