I read these tips from the following Taiwan web site: http://www.dearhoney.idv.tw/phpBB/article/viewforum.php?forum=3&total=9173 The whole idea is to bypass the lower quality resampling of soundcard or WDM kernel. First, disable Winamp's default mp3 plugin. You may also remove in_mp3.dll in the plugin directory. Then, download and install the mpg123 plugin from "http://www.aikis.or.jp/~otachan/" and the directsound (w/ SSRC) output plugin from "http://www.blorp.com/~peter/". After that, whenever applicable, enable the 24-bit output of all the input plugins, e.g. mpg123, vorbis decoder... Finally, choose the Directsound w/ SSRC as the output and configure it so that it resamples the sound to 48Khz and 16bit. Try and see if you can notice any improvement.
BTW: That directsound plugin you mentioned resamples the output to 48 kHz where AC97-compatible soundcards (like SB Live! and Audigy) won't resample. Non-AC97 -soundcards won't benefit from this (resampling to 48 kHz) at all since they don't have this nasty habit of resampling in the first place. Also one good mp3-plugin for Winamp is the MAD-plugin. It has several handy features: dithering, auto attenuation and resolutions from 8 to 32 bits. Get it at: http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin Markus
Yes that is very true. I beleive there are also many other soundcards (other than AC97 that is) that have been plaqued with the resampling issues. It naturally consumes some CPU cycles though.
>AC97-compatible soundcards (like SB Live! and Audigy) won't resample. AC97 soundcard do resample ! The first thing to do is going to the control panel/multimedia/audio/playback, and set the speakers to "hifi speakers", and the sample rate conversion quality to "best". Several people whose sound was much improved by the ssrc plugin said that they got exactly the same improvement just changing this Windows setting.
It was my understanding that AC97 soundcards at 48 kHz won't resample ? That was what I meant. Please, don't twist my words. Markus
Indeed, some Taiwan guys suggested that AC97 soundcards may perform sampling even if the input is 48kHz. It is because the internal mixing may be done at higher rates like 96kHz and the card will down-sample the result stream to produce a 48kHz output.
