When playing music audio increases and decreases

[Sartic]

Hi!

I have a weird problem on my laptop (Samsung R530) that I was really hoping I could get help with. Samsung support just said "format the drive", which I doubt will work.

When I play music (I haven't noticed this problem on for example movies) the volume increases/decreases, almost like some kind of limiter. The intros of the songs are fine, but when all the instruments starts it just goes up and down.

I've tried several different headphones, and today I bought an external USB soundcard and the exact same thing happens. I thought it would've fixed it.
The laptop speakers are completely useless so I can't hear if I have this problem when I play songs through them.
I've also disabled all the fast function buttons for volume control.
And when I bought it new I never used it for music, so I don't know if it used to work without the limiter effect.

Would really appreciate help! My sweet music sounds terrible!

[Eric]

I have experienced the same phenomenon with my wife's MP3 player that she uses in the car. The intro to a song sounds fine, but when the rest of the band really kicks up, the volume drops off. I haven't looked into any details, but my guess is that its related to the (relative) poor quality encoding of the MP3 files when they were made.

Try making some MP3 files with different software or different bit rate settings and see if this solves your problem...

[Sartic]

I've tried all kinds of different MP3 files and audio players. Same story.

[pedroskova]

You could try installing Foobar and the freeware driver ASIO4All. This circumvents Windows audio - the probable culprit.

...just a WAG.

[Sartic]

Originally Posted by pedroskova

You could try installing Foobar and the freeware driver ASIO4All. This circumvents Windows audio - the probable culprit.

...just a WAG.

Wooooohoooooooooo! This worked! Thank you so much!
Is there any way I could bypass the windows audio with Windows Media Player also?

And how come video audio won't get affected by this? Or will it if I play a blueray on it maybe?

[pedroskova]

Originally Posted by Sartic

Wooooohoooooooooo! This worked! Thank you so much!
Is there any way I could bypass the windows audio with Windows Media Player also?

And how come video audio won't get affected by this? Or will it if I play a blueray on it maybe?

short answer - don't know. I need to use ASIO drivers for my pc crossover, and knew that they bypassed Windows audio. Like I said, WAG. If you look into all of the options for customizing Foobar, I can see no reason why you would want to stick with Windows Media Player. Audio-wise, it offers a lot more options.

You could also look into J River media player - many people around here are big fans.