Sound issue.

Yesterday I noticed an MP3 sounded garbled in Windows Media Player. By "garbled" I mean, for instance, that the guitar will sound fine but when the vocal comes in it is 'gravely' or 'rattley' sounding. CDs played in the computer's player have the same issue.

My sound card was old, so I decided this would be a good time for an upgrade. I installed the brand new card but still had garbled sound. So I replaced my aging speaker system. Still had garbled sound.

I am Windows XP Professional w/ SP3.

I don't know where to go from here and would like some suggestions.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

Odd problem. Try installing a codec pack. I like the KLite Mega Pack as it has just about any audio and video codec you're ever likely to need. It also includes some great tools like the Codec Tweak Tool (to detect/remove/repair broken codecs) and GSpot (to determine which codec a file was encoded with), plus the KLite Mega Pack installs Media Player Classic as the default media player and I greatly prefer it over Windows Media Player (visually, it looks like the media player from old version of Windows). So, try the codec pack, and once it's installed, try playing the music with Media Player Classic instead of Windows Media Player. I was recently working on a PC that would not play music correctly thru Windows Media Player, but played fine through different media players. I did everything I could think of to get WMP to play correctly, but it just wouldn't, and re-installing clean Windows was not an option (I did re-install Windows Media Player 10 and 11 several times to no avail). I ended up just using Media Player Classic as the default main media player and all was well. Not really a fix, but an acceptable work-around.

 

I've had the K-Lite Codec pack installed for a while now. I had never tried to play music files on Media Player Classic, but in doing so now I find that MP3s and CDs still sound garbled when using it. (I noticed that Media Player Classic won't play Windows Media Audio files at all.) The sound is also garbled using ALShow player.

So the problem seems not to be the players. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Update. I find that the garbled sound I hear when playing both CDs and stored files occurs with Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic and ALShow, but NOT with VLC Media Player. I'll just use VLC as my default player from now on.

Still, the question is; what the hell?