CD Sound Poor in Windows 7

[stthrobber]

This is a strange one for me. I recently bought a double CD of the Doobie Brothers. CD1 I ripped to my PC and when I listened to it back, it's got white noise mixed in with the song. Imagine listening to the song as if played through a sieve?

 

I played it both using Media Player and Itunes and both exactly the same.

 

CD2 ripped perfectly.

 

I've played the CD on both of my Windows 7 PCs and get the same result, played it on a CD player and it's perfectly ok. I played it on my wife's laptop, with Vista and it played perfectly, so I had to rip it from there, and copy it, yet the 2nd CD plays perfectly on all my machines.

 

I've recently updated my klite codecs, but they were not the problem

 

Anyone have any ideas why this might be?

[stthrobber]

Further update on my question, it appears the common denominator in the CDs that this happens with is that they are on the Warner Bros label. It only happens in Windows 7 but I can't play, nor copy them on either of my machines that have Windows 7, only my wife's Vista laptop.

 

Don't know if this problem can be over ridden, but I'm learning all the time!

[saintbletch]

Odd stthrobber.

 

I had a similar problem many years back when ripping CDs from a specific label (not sure who that was) but it was some form of early DRM protection.

 

The problem you're describing seems to be related to Windows 7, Warner Brothers' CDs and certain CD drives and is discussed here and here.

 

Don't know how to fix it but I would recommend downloading Easy CD Extractor by Poikosoft - I think they do a free trial. The software let's you change the low-level characteristics of how the CD is read and how the audio stream is ripped. It has multiple strategies for error correction (did you know that even though a CD is digital, it doesn't guarantee that the same information is interpreted the same way every time?) and it can verify that the read of the CD is completely accurate by comparing it with a database of other users' rips.

 

Anyway, have a play with the CD drive and error correction settings in Easy CD Extractor and you might be able to get a faithful read of the CD.

[stthrobber]

Cheers I will try that