Popping.Clipping ever time I play music

Hey Everyone:

Hopefully someone can help me with this. for some reason when I listen to music I hear pops and clicks every once and a while. I use foobar2000 1.0 and I am pretty sure it isn't the music since I downloaded it here and I rewind the track and the click isn't in the same point in the song. It happens with MP3 and FLAC for some reason. I tried fooling around with settings in foobar to no avail, so nothing seems to fix it in foobar.

I also recorded using REAPER using a M-Audio MobilePre and the sounds still seem to occur for some reason. Seems to happen during playback. When I record something it seems clear enough and when I playback I hear pops and stuff, I rewind the track and the pops are in different places. I can't seem to notice any correlation between the tracks and the pops. I have a pair of headphones plugged into the MobilePre and the pops come through that.

Here are some other things I tried to help isolate the problem. I tried using both my laptop speakers and and headphones through the headphone out on my laptop, still pops. Tried updating my laptops sound card drivers, can't seem to find any for Windows 7 on the HP website (HP Pavilion dv6746ca), tried the Vista ones and the problem still happens. It seems to also happen with youtube videos as well.

I also tried a variety of different drivers, from my nForce drivers, to Conexant drivers, to really any other driver I could find. So I really have no idea. I even have Linux Mint installed on another partition and the sound works fine with Banshee music player.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I read in a previous post that someone suggested that it might be my motherboard giving out. Anyone have any other information on testing this theory?

Here are the specs for my comp and I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed with 4 Gigs of RAM instead of 2

Processor
AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-60
• 2.0 GHz, 512KB+512KB L2 Cache, Up to 1600 MHz system bus running at AC/DC mode 35 Watt
Standard memory
2048 MB
Memory type
DDR2 System Memory
Maximum memory
Supports up to 4 GB DDR2 memory
memory layout
2048 MB (2 x 1024 MB)
Internal drives
Internal hard disk drive
250 GB
Hard disk controller
SATA Hard Disk Drive
Hard disk drive speed
5400 rpm
Optical drive type
LightScribe Super Multi 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support
System features
Memory card device
5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, or xD Picture cards
Modem
High speed 56K modem
Network interface
Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector)
Wireless Technologies
Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n & Bluetooth
Wireless capability
Yes
External I/O ports
3 Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0, 2 Headphone out, 1 microphone-in, 1 HDMI, 1 VGA (15-pin), 1 TV-Out (S-video), 1 RJ-11 (modem), 1 RJ -45 (LAN), 1 notebook expansion port 3, 1 IEEE 1394 Firewire (4-pin), 1 Consumer IR
Video capture interface
IEEE 1394 FireWire® Interface
Expansion slots
One ExpressCard/54 slot (also supports ExpressCard/34)
Display size
15.4” WXGA High Definition BrightView Widescreen
Display resolution
1280 x 800
Video adapter
NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
Video RAM
Up to 1023MB Total Graphics Memory with 256MB dedicated
Control Panel
HP QuickPlay media player software and its dedicated menu controls, music and DVD buttons
Webcam
HP Pavilion WebCam with Integrated Microphone
Handheld remote control
HP Mobile Remote Control
Internal audio
3D Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound 16 bit integrated
Speakers and microphone
Altec Lansing® speakers
Keyboard
101 key compatible keyboard
Mouse/Pointing Device
Touch Pad with On/Off button and dedicated vertical Scroll Up/Down pad, volume control, mute buttons, 2 Quick Launch Buttons
power supply type
90W AC Adapter

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

i don't think it's the motherboard, but since you can't seem to find a proper driver, that might be part of the problem. have you tried using windows media player? also, what codec(s) have you installed, if any, to support flac? (or maybe it's already available in win7?, i dont' know)

the only other thing i can think of is there are too many processes running in the background, but i really haven't seen this to be a problem for a long time, especially playing music.

 

Thanks for the reply. It doesn't work with any media player and it isn't a problem with the files cause I can play them fine from another computer. The codec doesn't seem to matter because foobar support flac natively, plus the problem also occurs with mp3s.

 

So does anybody have any idea what I could possibly do. I can't even listen to music cause it bothers me so much.

 

you said you tried the driver(s) listed on hp's site. there are drivers listed for both realtek and conexant. if both of these drivers installed correctly you may be having a problem with them. Can you remove all remnants of the sound drivers (both realtek and connexant) and reboot the computer. You might even want to run Ccleaner's registry cleanup, then let windows install the driver for you, even check windows update for it. use driver sweeper to remove remnants of realtek's drivers. ( i don't think it will work for connexant, but just use the add/remove programs control panel)

If you are unsure which sound card you have, you can use Everest to find out.

 

Hey. Thanks again for all the help. I uninstalled the driver like you said and when I did I restarted my computer. The Windows 7 found the driver for it and installed it and I had sound. I am still running into the same issue though. I also found out exactly what the sound card is. It is a Conexant High Definition SmartAudio 221 card and right now it has version 4.31.0.50 of the driver which I got from Device Manager.