Building the perfect Windows Based Music Server - Part II

As mentioned in part I, the first stage in improving music playback on Windows XP is to bypass the Kmixer, and the best way to do this to use an altenative direct show filter iinstead of Direct Sound. Fortunately the solution is very easy and free. Reclock (http://reclock.free.fr/) has been around for a while now and is mainly used for syncing graphics cards with dual ouputs to large televisions for smooth DVD picture playback. What is not as well documented on the web is that it also has some nifty audio options, one of which is being able to choose what to do with PCM audio. By selecting Kernal Streaming as highlighted above in the screenshot, We can send the digital audio from Windows Media Player straight to the soundcard preserving the 44.1hz original signal. Incidentally by selecting Kernal Streaming for AC3/SPDIF will also improve sound quality playback when using software like Power DVD as the Kmixer also samples 5.1 signals as well.

Once you have enabled Kmixer, you should notice much cleaner and accurate sound quality and the easiest way to test if Kmixer is being bypassed is to test the volume control within Windows Media Player which should now not work as the wave out level is part of Kmixer.

This entry was posted on Friday November 2nd, 2007 at 9:48 AM and is filed under MP3 Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.

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