Audigy owners read

[bjay125]

If you have an Audigy sound card, and you get skipping or have other general problems with any of the directsound plugins, here is how you fix it....

Start>Run and type "dxdiag" without the quotes
go to the Sound tab
reduce directsound acceleration - which is the slider

I had to reduce it to "Basic" but now I have absolutely no problems with any directsound plugins. I also didn't notice any cpu hit by doing this, at least while playing Winamp. I didn't test any games, so maybe you might want to bump acceleration back up to play games and reduce it to play winamp. If you have any sound related issues while playing games then definitely reduce the acceleration. Several of us have reported this issue on Creative's newsgroup server so I can only hope someone is listening and it gets fixed in a future driver release.

I hope this helps someone out there!

[peter]

now this is interesting, the same option fixed some weird problems with my sblive under xp. thanks for posting it here.

[Sawg]

SoundBlaster Users (SBLive/Audigy) : Read This First

Noted there (Stickey in this forum).

[DJ Egg]

Also added to the SB Audigy/Live! thread in TSGH.

Cheers

[bjay125]

Oops, I take that "no change in cpu" statement back. There is a noticeable change in CPU usage as you decrease the directsound acceleration, but its still not quite as bad as the wav out plugin. Definitely worth the benefit of the excellent output plugins written by the Winamp crew and Peter!

I would recommend backing the acceleration down a notch at a time until your problems go away. I would imagine the amount of needed acceleration reduction might vary depending on the particular system.

[peter]

yes, it DOES eat extra CPU due to hw acceleration being disabled, but it's probably still faster than waveOut most of time anyway, and the amount of extra CPU time is unnoticeable on 1GHz+ machines.
[edit] quick note that above info applies to win2k/xp machines, on win9x disabling dsound acceleration means emulating dsound on waveOut, which will always eat more CPU than waveOut itself.

[Bax]

I got Windows XP/Audigy and I had this same problem in 2.80(always used wavout prior to 2.80).
Anyway, try setting your Preset to custom and use a Buffer length of 500 ms and a prebuffer of 30%.
I've experimented alot and this works flawless so far.

[Bagheera]

I got the EXACT same problem, dude! Skipping in DirectSound plugin when using WinAmp with DirectSound plugin.

What's funny is that 1) I could use my SB Live 5.1 with the DirectSound plugin without any problem, 2) WaveOut plugin works fine with Audigy without skipping.

I bet it's another one of Audigy's driver issues.. grrr. I don't think Creative acknowledge this bug though. They did acknowledge two other bugs I reported with regard to MIDI.

[HI THERE]

hey... thanks a lot for the fix... i was just about the melt my sound card n piss on it... works great now... no more skips

[somejackass22]

thank you, thank you, thank you

You'd think frigging creative would know about this. When I called them to complain that sounds were skipping in all my favorite games (hadn't upgraded to 2.8/directsound out yet), they said "try a different PCI slot". IDIOTS! Anyway, downgrading to basic worked BETTER than a charm. THANK YOU! Goodbye, snap, crackle, pop, and er, skip!

Good riddance!
-somejackass22