Help - Sonic Stage Hand-Grenade Effect

[Lycan_Galen]

Hi folks.

I've had the mis-fortune of experiencing first hand the side of SS that gets all the complaints. Honestly, at this point, I just want to get my computer back to something similar to what it was before SS helped turn it into a non-music friendly machine.

So, I installed SS v4.3 on my system, it installed cleanly (well, no indicated problems at the very least). then I tried to run the program, and it would continually crash, just giving the windows message of "this program has encountered an error..." I found later that if I told the program not to attempt to find the file information (specifically artist links) during the transfer to my new NW-E015F it wouldn't crash. However, I had been using winamp to go through my music selection and decide what I wanted to put on. Wimamp went glitchy, and after restarting, files play, I can still see the audio levels moving on the winamp display, however nothing audible is coming out. Windows Media Player is playing at about 150% speed. SS plays the music at double speed aswell. When I play any of my music files on VLC media player, they play back at regular speed.

Yes, I had FFDshow installed (though from what I can tell nothing was using it, it has since been uninstalled with no change) and I also typically run Windowblinds 5, though it has been disabled for the time being. I have uninstalled SS completely, in hopes of getting whatever got screwed up straightened out.

Hardware specs:

P4 3.4 GHz CPU

1 GB Kingston DDR SDRAM

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series

Typical Software specs:

Windows XP MCE, Service Pack 2

Trenc Micro PC-cillin Internet security 2007

Logitech Mouse and keyboard (for a Logitech G5 mouse)

UPSMON Plus for windows (power supply)

Zboard (for my keyboard)

Lexmark Print Server

Wacom Tablet Driver

Google Desktop

Windowblinds 5

Also:

Winamp 5.35 Pro

Windows Media Player 11.0.5721.5145

VLC Media Player 0.8.4a

Thanks a heap to any suggestions, and also to those who made it to the bottom, lol...all I can figure is that maybe the regular mp3 codecs are FUBAR, but still not sure about how exactly to repair those.

Also, any ideas why this happened in the first place? I guess I just find it hard to believe that FDDshow and Windowblinds managed to give me this much trouble when I've never had issues before now (~3 years with both).

Thanks again.

*** Update ***

Have gotten Winamp working again, went through, reset everything to default, and all of a sudden the volume control popped all the way down to 0%, so brought it back up and it's good to go again. So now it's just a matter of what WMP and SS have in common. Hmm.

Edited July 28, 2007 by Lycan_Galen