Windows audio problem

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure why playing CD audio is so resource intensive on recent
> Windows systems...  But to verify if this is a problem for you, it
> should be simple to look at your system performance in task manager.
> If the CPU is spiking when you have your static problem, then I'd
> guess that's the cause.  As for what to do about it, maybe upgrading
> is the only viable solution (as silly as it sounds), other than  just
> playing your CDs under Linux (or on an actual CD player).

One reason is that recent versions of Windows are usually set up to play 
CDs digitally (that is, do digital audio extraction on the CD, and then 
play the data through the sound card) rather than using the audio output 
of the CD-ROM drive. This typically sounds better on modern computers; 
the audio out of most CD-ROM drives isn't very good. It also makes 
things like visualizations possible (those sound-content-related screen 
shows that many programs, including Windows Media Player, like to put 
on). There is a setting for that somewhere, but I don't remember where 
it is, and I'm sending this from Linux, so I can't look for it now.

All the Linux CD-audio players I am familiar with use the audio output 
of the CD-ROM drive. Such a player uses almost no CPU time at all; it 
just has to look at the drive every once in a while to update the time 
display.