Audio Playback issue
 

So I decided to rip most of my favorite cd's onto my new computer, since I spend a good deal of time here. Now I did them all in MP3 formatt like 192 KBPS.

Im using Quintessential for a player. My problem is that during some of the songs (generally seems to apply to entire albums) I will get little snaps from my speakers. They arnt really loud, but they do get annoying when the volume is low, because you can hear them a lot. My question is: Any way to determine if its a speaker issue? A data(recording) issue? or a playback issue?

And how can I fix it?

Do they happen at the exact same time in each recording? If you play the songs in WinAmp, do they still happen, and at the exact same time?

I dont have win amp, and I believe they happen randomly, its kind of hard to tell.

I should add though that I have played the music with both Quintessential and Dell's Jukebox by Musicmatch. Both had the clicks.

Are your speaker cables wrapped around/tangled up with your other computer wires? Some people have had sound improvement if they keep the speaker wire separated.

Since it's happening to the whole albums and, if I understood you right, not for all the albums, I would say it was your original cd that's at fault.

If your original CDs had scratches on them, rippers will sometimes try to compensate for the missing data by inserting a chunk of data to fill the gap so that your music doesn't skip forward, losing the beat. This generates that "squeaky click" sound. This may or may not be your problem. The easiest way to find out is to do a controlled experiment:

1. Pick one track that seems to exhibit the problem frequently
2. Play this track on several players, noting the times within the track that you hear the clicks.
3. If the clicks happen at the same point in all players, then most likely you've got an MP3 with some corrupt/missing data. See my comment about scratches above.
4. If the clicks seem to be happening at random, then you might be having some kind of hardware problem. A hard drive/CD-ROM set in PIO mode (instead of DMA) will often cause MP3 playback to skip due to the system blocking on disk I/O. Also, electrical noise can sometimes infiltrate cheap onboard sound cards (and some expensive PCI cards too) and cause ground-loop hums, clicks, whines, etc. Not much you can do about that kind of problem. Finally, you could have something as simple as a loose speaker connection. A dirty/loose 1/8" stereo plug can make clicking/scratching sounds in your speakers.

I suppose that would just about cover the possibilities...start investigating!