Yep. Stop running the sound over the IDE and PCI bus.
Unfortunately WMP defaults to this configuration when installed to make the "visualizations" work. That also forces the D-to-A to happen by your CPU rather than offload to the soundcard. To get analog or digital passthrough to the soundcard back do this:
1. Buy a three wire analog CD audio cable or two wire digital CD S/PDIF cable (5 volt cable, different from external S/PDIF, Frys has them for $5 »
shop1.outpost.com/produc ··· /2754483) and connect it between the three/two wire port on your CD-ROM or DVD and the three/two wire Analog/Digital CD "in" port on your sound card (Soundblaster Live or Audigy have the digital CD in port).
2. Go into device manager for your CD ROM or DVD and enable analog and/or digital S/PDIF port output (disable digital audio extraction over the IDE cable) by unchecking "enable digital CD audio for this CD ROM device". Zen test here, "digital" is referring to DAE, not the S/PDIF port. Two completely different digital outputs types from the CD ROM / DVD.
3. Go into WMP CD audio tab under options and uncheck "digital playback" to disable the processor-based D-to-A and re-enable analog and/or digital S/PDIF passthrough to your sound card. Again, "digital" here is referring to DAE and not the CD S/PDIF digital. This step will kill your WMP visualizations.
4. Turn on your software volume control applet with the control panel->sounds and multimedia->"show volume control on the taskbar" applet. Then open the applet from the tray and go to "options" then "properties" to turn the analog CD and/or digital CD sliders back on. WMP disables the "CD Digital" one completely when WMP is installed, and resets the main slider to a very low volume level when you uncheck the "digital playback" box in WMP. You won't have a "CD Digital" slider option unless you sound card supports it with an oncard two wire port and you have installed the drivers (the soundblaster drivers add the CD Digital slider).
5. Make sure "CD Audio" (for analog) and "CD Digital" (for digital) are checked to show the sliders. Say OK. Go to the applet sliders and make sure both "CD digital" and "CD Audio" are un-muted and sliders are up. Bring the main "play control" slider back up to undo what WMP did. Then re-mute either the analog to digital slider since the same sound would come in on both. Digital sounds better.
6. Reboot and play! Your skipping will be gone because the sound now goes directly from your CD ROM analog (if 3 wire) or S/PDIF digital (if two wire) ports to your sound card, bypassing the IDE/PCI buss and processor - and all the bursty computer buss traffic like your web browser talking to the network card that can interfere with continuous audio streams.
The D-to-A now happens using the sound card's high quality D-to-A converter. The downside is the you will loose your visualizations in WMP. That is the tradeoff to consider: visualizations or skip-free purely digital signal path audio using high quality D-to-A converters.
[text was edited by author 2002-07-07 01:18:32]