why does wmp 7 have such terrible mp3 quality?

[dpopiz]

nono, I don't use wmp!😱
but I've been building a lot of systems with winxp for my n00b friends and few of them have complained about the sound quality. I tried it and, yes the sound quality for mp3s is horrendous -- why? what can be done about it?

 

[Adrian Tung]

Check to see if both the SRS effects and EQ have been enabled? They may be the cause of the bad sound quality.


🙂atwl

 

[corkyg]

You also may have a lower resolution set than you might like. Go for a higher sampling rate. It's there. What I hear is near CD quality.

 

[dpopiz]

hmm well are those settings enabled by default because this has been happening on a bunch of systems I've sold with winxp.
I just have to keep telling people to dl winamp

 

[Diable]

IIRC WMP only encodes mp3's at 56k because of licensing reasons i.e. Microsoft doesn't what to play the Fraunhoffer Institute for the full codec so they bundle the free version. You could install the basic version of MusicMatch Jukebox now that its free.

 

[rbV5]

<< IIRC WMP only encodes mp3's at 56k because of licensing reasons >>


How does that affect playback? WMP 7 sounds fine on my rig.

 

[richleader]

I thought it was 128, is 56 even an option? At any rate, it shouldn't effect playback. I haven't noticed any extra suck, but yeah, check for driver and volume issues. You never know when one of the channels is messed up some how, whether it's set too low, turned off, has an effect placed on it; especially with sblives because with the normal drivers the options aren't as obvious as with the liveware set.

 

[corkyg]

I don't know about default, but my MP3s are now playing at 160 kbps, and that sounds pretty darn good. I recorded them using ECDC 5 SoundStream and SpinDoctor. (In XP Pro.)