First, here’s my system specs:

Abit F-I90HD

2 GB DDR2-800

ATI Radeon 3470

Hauppauge PVR-500

Onboard sound (Realtek ALC888)

2 HDD

LG GGC-H20L

Logitech Z-5500 (Toslink)

Software:

Vista 32 bits fresh install

All drivers are up to date

FFDSHOW

Here’s the problem, when I play a CD, everything sounds great. I have “good” sound from my speakers in all modes (stereo, stereo x2, Dolby PLII, 6 channels direct).

Like a lot of us do, I rip all my CD’s to MP3 or WMA and add it to my music library.Here comes the bizarre behavior: if I play those MP3’s through Winamp it sounds nearly identical to the CD. It’s almost impossible to distinguish between CD and MP3 or WMA.

Now, if I use Windows Media Player, the resulting sound is sometimes “wavy”, or degraded. The sound doesn’t “stay” where it should, it goes up and down, voice and instruments are constantly alterning between clear and muffled. It just doesn’t sound right. About 40% (estimate) of my albums like Depeche Mode Violator sound great but the others are horrible to listen to.

I have done a lot of research to solve this problem. I think that the problem is the MP3 codec (mp3dmod.dll) that is used by mfpmp.exe (Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE).

I have tried to change the default codec to l3codeca.acm or others codecs but no matter what I tried, WMP is always launching mfpmp.exe when a MP3 is played.

I have about 1700 albums all tagged and encoded in MP3. All album covers are 500X500 (often manually scanned by me since I have a good amount of french music).I would prefer to keep them like that, I don’t want to re-encode everything.

If I encode to OGG, everything is fine for all songs.

Would I lose a lot of quality if I do a MP3 to OGG transfer ? I tried to convert some albums with dbPowerAMP and the result seems acceptable. All my tags are also translated (even the Album Artist that is so important to MCE).

Am I the only one with this problem ? I really need some advice !

Tried OGG and FLAC. They both ply very well.

FLAC would take about 900GB on my server, I think that I will go that route. With the fast expanding storage capacity of HDD's, it will be easy to maintain a big losless music collection.

This might be stating the obvious but I just wanna point it out anyway. Have you tried making sure that any sound enhancements are disabled and/or optimized correctly? I know that the SRS WOW effects can sometimes cause these problems (as can the equalizer and the Quiet Mode).

If you have each of these enhancements working it could act similarly to an Auto Gain function which makes quieter sounds louder and louder sounds quieter. I had this on an old MP3 player I used to have and had to disable the feature.

I must admit that I have noticed a change in 2 or 3 of my songs since I started using WMP 11 over a year ago, similar to what you have described, but I just chalked it up to me using enhancements.

I don't know much about the codecs, but your symptoms sound similar to a couple of problems I've had in the past which are related to enhancements.