weirdness while playing mp3 files?!

[tsurikov]

Hi everyone,

I've got a modern PC (Pentium 4 2.80 GHz, 1 GB RAM) running Windows XP Pro Ver 2002 SP 2. It's used in a lab environment, and when not gathering data, it provides us with music from a large (1300 songs) MP3 collection. We use the playlist function in Windows Media Player (version 9.00.00.3250) to play songs randomly.

But there's weirdness afoot. Sometimes the music that comes out SLOWS DOWN or SPEEDS UP randomly, with frequency changes - exactly like what'd happen if I were using a record player and slowing down/speeding up the rotation. Sometimes WMP just stops a song in the middle and skips to the next one. And sometimes WMP skips back a few seconds. These events seem to happen randomly - there's nothing special happening on the computer at that time. (It's not even touched when playing music... we're usually slaving away in the next room.)

I don't even know where to begin on this one. The first failure mode puzzles me the most - a computer ISN'T a record player, and I don't understand how it emulates a record player!

Any input would be greatly appreciated by all us lab rats here!

Thanks so much!
--Michael

 

[micker377]

Have you tried updating to MediaPlayer 10.0?

 

[evolutionary]

You should try something like winamp, which has all the function of the WMP, but runs much better. Also, have you checked out what processes are running when the mp3s slow? My old computer used to do that when the memory was getting taxed.

 

[tsurikov]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the insight and suggestions. Installing Winamp didn't work - same symptoms.

But I thought I'd share with y'all that we finally found a solution. We discovered our hard drive was obscenely fragmented (it's because of the way our research data gets acquired). I've never seen so much red in Disk Defragmenter. Anyway, we defragged it, and have had no problems since then.

Cheers to all,
--Michael