Sound distortion on startup

Hi all, here's my little problem. When my computer starts up, the startup sound is completely distorted. It hasn't always happened, but I can't pinpoint the time when it started happening. However, I'm pretty sure that it has something to do with the order in which the drivers are loading because once it's completely booted up, all sound functions are perfectly fine.

Can someone point me to some online resource where I can figure out how to tell what order the drivers are loading and make sure that sound-related drivers are loaded before the startup sound is played?

By the way (just in case someone wanders), it's not the startup sound file that has a problem. I can play the same file at any point later and it sounds just fine.

This is not a critical issue, obviously, but it bugs the heck out of me!

Thanks!

Nora

 

You have very little control over the loading order of drivers. I would think you could be more likely to fix your problem by updating the audio drivers. If no updated drivers are available, try uninstalling and reinstalling the existing.

 

Do you perhaps have a Creative soundcard installed with the old PlayCenter software? If you do, the Creative mp3 encoder (ctmp3.acm) is not compatible with WMP.

I never had the problem with XP, but it's noticable on 9x.

However, it couldn't hurt to go into Sounds and Audio Devices, Hardware tab and under Audio Codecs click the properties for the Creative codec and choose the not use this device. This enables Windows to use the Fraunhofer codec and things work as they should. If you like using PlayCenter, it still works fine unless you're gonna use it to make mp3's.

Sometimes this problem also effects how mp3's are played in WMP. Not using that device eliminates problems like mp3's delaying at playing, distorting, sounding bad, skipping, etc.

Of course, sometimes this problem is caused by startup stuff like Firewalls and VirusScanners, as well as USB devices, interferring with the startup song.

 

I have this on occasion, my workaround was to either reduce startups or pick another startup sound that was much shorter, or ignore it. As you said, it was not a big enough deal to make a fuss about. I didn't spend to much time on it. That's how I wound up with the work around of the shorter startup sound.

 

Thanks to all who replied. I tried a couple of suggestions, but they didn't work. Being as this is not a critical problem, I think I'll try Goddez1's suggestion. In fact, I'll even go one better. I'll take out the startup sound altogether.

Thanks and have a great week!

Nora

 

Sometimes you've just got to pick your battles and since this was minor it sounds like a perfectly good work around to me, particularly if this is your only sound issue. Thanks for sharing the post outcome.

 

Hello Nora,

If you still want to persue this, you can add varying startup intervals to your programs changing the sequence of the startups or just adding more time between them:

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay

Regards - Charles