Strange audio problem

[dvryce84]

Whenever I play my anime the sound always comes out and you can make out what the characters are saying and whatnot but there is an anoying background noise, that sounds something like going to a nearby radio station and then turning the dial once in either direction, you can still understand anything but it sounds awful. It seems to get worse whenever music starts, so it makes listening to the opening and closings horrible. (as well as any time music begins, which happens very frequently in anime such as Beck) I have tried Ace Mega Codecs and then removed them and tried ffdshow with: Media Player 9, Media Player Classic, Divx Player, bsplayer, and Zoom Player. I also tried mdplayer and vlc. All of them had this problem except vlc, which had an even worse problem. Whenever I tried playing anything on vlc the sound would skip and jerk forward then back again and have extremely loud pops and cracks and would just turn into an awful mess.

Interestingly enough, if I play normal music or whatnot, it plays perfectly. Also, when I tried playing the anime (on Media Player Classic) without any codecs installed (and therefore got sound but no picture) the sound came out fine. It is only when I have both video and sound when I begin to have problems.

Okay, I tried a couple more things (none of which worked unfortunately, but hopefully it will help somebody identify my problem) I tried playing a DVD and the DVD played perfectly fine. I also tried to trick my computer, so I took all the codecs off started a file in vlc, muted it, and then started the same file in windows media player so that if everything worked vlc would provide the video and media player the sound, unforturnately it did not work. The sound came out like it normally would for media player with the video playing. By this time I was really frustrated so I took all my anime and put it on my external hard drive and then formated my regular drive, reinstalled windows and put vlc and an episode of anime on my computer. No luck. Sooo, now, not only am I having trouble with watching anime I have been going through all the steps to get my computer up and running again. Feh. Oh well. I really hope all this helps somebody identify the problem so I can watch my anime without it driving me insane.

Okay, things seem to only be getting weirder. Every episode has problems except I was just trying out some episodes and Grenadier works perfectly, but only the releases by anime keep. I thought that it might just be something anime keep did differently than others but I have other series from anime keep that don't work. I really hope someone can help me out here. I am just utterly confused by everything.

Thankyou very much.

[DarkAeons]

Weird.
First time I ever see something like that, do you have any problem while playing non-anime video files ? (like a movie in XVID/DIVX with CBR/VBR mp3 sounds or AC3)
might be a playback issue, do you have a multi-channel sound card ? (like 5.1, 6.1, 7.1)
have you installed the correct & updated drivers for your soundcard ? (not the one that came with windows)

[dvryce84]

Well, my sound card is a Mad Dog Predator 6 channel 5.1 card (although I have a 4.1 system) I installed the drivers that came with the card when I installed it and I just now tried to update the drivers at their website. No luck.

I tried out various videos that I have. DVDs play fine. Anime Music Videos and regular music videos play fine and I think other downloaded video works fine, although I did not check this out since I did not have any on hand and I am working off a dial up right now ( I will try tommorow at school but I think it works just fine)

I am not quite sure what CBR/VBR and AC3 sounds are? So I am assuming I don't have any of that type to check. If you direct me to a site that has downloads with those types of audios I could download and check it tommorow or sometime.

Yea, it is really weird. I searched all over a couple different forums looking for anything similar but could not find anything.

Thanks for the help and I hope the information above will help someone identify the problem/

[DarkAeons]

most movies rip use AC3 sound (DVD quality), and anime & tv shows rips usually use mp3 with a Variable Bit Rate (VBR) which takes less place when you encode the movie, some ppl might use Constant Bit Rate (CBR) but I rarely seen it (which I would like 'cuz when I transfer my anime into something my DVD stand-alone player can handle, the pulldown process always fails, its really picky on sound)

btw for your issue, there seems to be something like center channel being inversed with subwoofer channell, I don't think that's the problem there but if it ever was, there should be a way to fix this by using the jumper on your sound card

so you updated and still no change ? why don't you try the card in 2.0 mode (stereo) to see if you still have the issue, try it with headphones plugged into the sound card, u never know, maybe its from the speakers >.<

[dvryce84]

Yea, I don't think I have anything in AC3 format to check that out, but I did test the 2.0 mode and headphones mode, both had the same problems as the normal mode.

However, when you mentioned the AC3 format I downloaded GSpot to check out if any of what I had just happened to have that format. None did, but if you remember I said that the Grenadier episodes I downloaded from Anime Keep would play fine but any other episode of any other series would not. I checked one of those episodes on GSpot and it said that the audio was 28kbps CBR, while the other files had a much higher value, like 128kbps or higher. Most of those files were CBR as well but the files that seemed to play the worst were of the VBR type.

Oh, I have also recently downloaded and just checked the Violenist of Hamelin and it also plays just fine. And when I checked it on GSpot it used a wma audio decoder instead of the usual ffdshow audio decoder.

I hope this helps.

[DarkAeons]

ok so u have ffdshow
try this: open Audio Filter Configuration in ffdshow folder (Start -> All Programs -> ffdshow) and look what's the library used to decode mp3, try another one then check any anime you know who had issues

[dvryce84]

hmmm, I went to the audio filter configuration and on mp3 it had mp3lib selected and the only other options were libmad and disabled. I tried both but neither seemed to make a difference.

However, on GSpot it says I have 3 audio codecs installed and after checking it each time I changed the audio filter for ffdshow, I only got to use 2 of those. mp3lib and libmad both claimed to use ffdshow audio decoder and if I disabled it, GSpot said I was using mpeg layer 3 decoder but it said I have 3 audio codecs installed and the last is Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer 3 Codec advanced, but I don't know how to switch to try that codec.

Also, interestingly, GSpot said I had no video codec installed and the file would most likely play without video but when I rendered it it said I used the ffdshow mpeg layer 4 decoder so I don't know if that means anything.

Thanks

[DarkAeons]

yeah ffdshow is useful for this but you should get xvid/divx anyway & set up the default codec used for xvid/divx to the one you installed.

about the sound issue... still dunno how it is happening

can you get another sound card (borrow it from a friend) to test if the sound issue is comming from your current card ?

[dvryce84]

actually the sound card is new. I thought that might have been the problem at first because I was simply running the sound of the soundcard built into the motherboard. Unfortunately it did not fix anything.

It doesn't seem like anything is working. Are there, perhaps other codecs I might find that could perhaps solve the problem or perhaps find a way to lower the audio kbps value. (The episodes of grenadier that work have a low value and everything else has a much higher value.)

Thanks.

[DarkAeons]

you could try to download a codec pack, I suggest you try kazaalite codec pack

[dvryce84]

Forgive me for taking so long to reply, for some reason my computer did not want to download that codec pack (It took me 12 tries!) but I finally got it to download and it does not look like that worked, although there do seem to be a lot more tools that came with the pack. I checked with GSpot and I still have 3 audio codecs, but it now says I have 5 available video codecs. I found one tool, the 4CC code changer, which it seems let me change the video codec a file uses or something like that. I am still not sure if there is a way to change the audio codec out.

Also, when installing the pack there were a lot of options given and I just went with the default package and I was not sure if perhaps there might have been something available that I did not take that could help. (or perhaps did take that is hurting)

Thanks for all the help.

[dvryce84]

Forgive me for taking so long to reply, for some reason my computer did not want to download that codec pack (It took me 12 tries!) but I finally got it to download and it does not look like that worked, although there do seem to be a lot more tools that came with the pack. I checked with GSpot and I still have 3 audio codecs, but it now says I have 5 available video codecs. I found one tool, the 4CC code changer, which it seems let me change the video codec a file uses or something like that. I am still not sure if there is a way to change the audio codec out.

Also, when installing the pack there were a lot of options given and I just went with the default package and I was not sure if perhaps there might have been something available that I did not take that could help. (or perhaps did take that is hurting)

Thanks for all the help.

[DarkAeons]

there's no way except maybe to demux the file, by doing this you'll get one video file and one audio file.. not the best option thought
why don't you try to use the fourcc changer to see if the problem isn't comming from the video codecs

[dvryce84]

sorry about the double post above.

I tried the 4cc changer and it had xvid, divx, div3, div4, mp43, and mp42 as the options for both description code and used codec. I was not quite sure what the description code was for, but for the used codec, the filles were set initially to xvid. I then tried it on each of the 5 other choices. divx presented the exact same thing as xvid. div3 and div4 turned the picture into a mess of colors and left the sound problem. mp43 and mp42 took awhile to load and when they did, they did not have picture but the sound was perfect and the bar displaying the time process did not move but the time tracker did go forward and if you moved the tracker from 0 it the sound stoped.

Not quite sure what to try now. It seems like GSpot should allow you to choose which codec you want to use there as it lists off each of the available codecs but I could not find a way to do this.

Also, I am not sure if it really matters but I was using Media Player Classic for all these tests.

Thanks.