Software trouble-shooting -- CD/mp3 player

**Damon Rondeau** · #1 11-01-2005, 02:03 PM

Hey all -- I've got a snakey software problem and I'm wondering if I can get any leads (i.e., free help) outta my bass pals. Some of you are computer honchos, I just know it...

On my home desktop PC, I'm getting mono playback on almost everything in my CD and PC music collection. The symptom here is no input signal on the right channel. I've got an Echo Mia card in there with a software console that lets me see the input and ouptut signals on the card. I can see that there's nothing happening on the right input. I can pan the left signal over to the right channel and see the result on the console in addition to hearing the result on the right speaker. So the speakers and connections are just fine. Seems to me the card is functioning fine, too.

Here's the peculiar thing: one of my three software audio players -- Zinf -- plays CD audio just fine, in stereo as recorded. No problem. However, on mp3 and wma it reverts back to mono, back to the problem state. With my three other software audio players (Windows Media Player, foobar 2000, and GoldWave Audio Editor), I get mono for everything I present to them: CD audio, mp3, wav, flac, wma...

So, with hardware seeming good and the fact that one player is operating normally and the others now aren't (this just happened yesterday, till then everything has been operating normally for years) leads me to believe that something has to have changed in the software environment and I don't really have a clue what it could be. I'm not aware I did anything to make a change but something has to have changed....

Does this seem simple and obvious to any of you bass brethren out there? If it does, maybe you could throw a brother a bone.

Thanks much.

JMX · #2 11-01-2005, 02:21 PM

Check all possible mixer stages (windows mixer and/or soundcard mixer).
Some programs that use the ASIO interface (e.g. Cubase) automatically mute one channel/side if you activate a mono channel in the software, and this can stay muted afterwards.
I recall this happening to me with my M-Audio Audiophile (you could shut this off in the driver somewhere).

**Damon Rondeau** · #3 11-01-2005, 02:33 PM

Went to Echo and found a slightly newer driver/install package. Downloaded it and ran it and everything fine again. Something went haywire but now it's all good again.

Thankee all and back to your regular programming ...