it's hard to say if you wasted your money. i bought nero and i love it. i've never had any issues with it: every CD that I have ever burned using nero has been flawless. as for plextools, since they only work with plextor drives and are bundles with plextor drive i cannot tell you what you're...

one example of avoiding resampling with your santa cruz would be to get Foobar2000 for playing your audio files and configure it to use kernel streaming and resample it to 48khz. the resampling that would take place inside of foobar2000 would be of much better quality than the santa cruz's.

i think the audigy 4 would probably be overkill for him and also more money that he wants to spend on a soundcard. perhaps he should try the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 which has pretty good sound quality.

go into Foobar's preferences -> display -> title formating. under the "playlist" tab delete everything and insert the following string: %_playlist_number% %artist% - %title% %_length%

yeah! no more creative crap in my system. i currently run a dual soundcard system composed of the m-audio revolution 7.1 and an emu 1212m. sure, the computer takes a hit in performance when playing games but it's very small although could be greater on a slow system. in my opinion, it's...

Quote: Originally Posted by Asterix I have tried everything, followed instructions given to me directly from Creative Professional's tech support, messed with PCI latency settings, checked every possible setting in Windows and BIOS, I've changed slots twice, messed with patchmix settings...

asio provides direct access to the soundcard and thereby bypassing windows' kmixer which can *potentionally* affect the sound negatively. asio also provides low latency but that is something that's usually only important to people recording music. by using asio you might or might not hear a...

you could also try ASIO4ALL at http://www.asio4all.com/ here's a snippet from the site: "ASIO4ALL is a hardware-independent low latency ASIO driver for WDM audio devices. It uses WDM Kernel-Streaming and sometimes even more sophisticated methods to achieve its objectives."

don't know about the 0404 but with my 1212m i've had so-so success getting it to work properly with games. mind you, you'll get plain jane stereo sound like the above person mentioned. the problems that i've had with my 1212m would include the sound going mute after a few minutes of playing a...

i don't listen to only one type of genre of music so i don't bother with equalizing the sound except to add a little bass because the Grado SR-325's bass isn't as strong as I prefer. I think it makes more sense to increase the frequencies of sound where you think your setup is weak. Of...

my two soundcard setup consists of an EMU 1212M and an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 which configured for digital out. the digital-out on the Revo is connected to the EMU's digital in. perhaps you can rig up a similar config with your Audigy 2 ZS and whatever other SC you get.

so long as you keep a backup of your FLACs you can always reburn the CD should it start sounding noticeably inferior.

go to the homepage for foobar 2000 (http://foobar2000.org) and get the special edition from the download section. it should have almost everything you'll want except for the GUI replacements/components such as Columns_UI or the Itunes like interface. as for output mode, it is recommended to...

click on the button that's in the upper right hand corder of patchmix that's labeled "fx". it will display a list of FX you can insert into a strip. also, these FX can only be used when your session is set for 44.1kzh or 48khz sampling rate. anyway, there are a lot of different effects you can...

if you an EMU card than try using the leveling amp to reduce clipping. it does a good job, i think.