I don't get the specifics, but on the WinAmp forums, they blamed the sound drivers (and some new fangled sound stuff in Win2k) for sound glitches. Something to do with simultaneous playing of different sounds?

That's one feature about Windows 2000 that I really like. I don't think it's related to my "volume" question, though conceivably it could be.

The feature is as follows:

1) In previous versions of Windows, only one application could play a wave file at the same time. So you couldn't, for example, listen to tunes in WinAmp while simultaneously playing Quake. (Note that this is unrelated to mixing multiple analog inputs such as line-in and CD audio. I'm talking about the system's digital wave output, used for games, system sounds, and playing MP3 files.)

2) Some sound card manufacturers figured out how to write their drivers in such a way so that the driver could dynamically mix the sounds from multiple applications, allowing the very things that you couldn't originally do because of (1), above.

3) Windows 2000 now includes the feature in (2) above by default for its built-in sound drivers. The mixing is done in software at the driver level.

This is a really neat feature and I'm glad they included it in Windows 2000.

It has some glitches, yes. For example, some applications depend upon the device driver "locking" while it's playing a given sound. For instance, a game that plays different wave files for each snippet of dialog in a cinematic cutscene might depend upon this feature to prevent the lines from piling on top of each other. This happens (intermittently) when I try to play StarCraft on Windows2000- dialog that's supposed to happen sequntially instead happens simultaneously.

Still, it's a great technology and I'm glad it's there.

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Tony Fabris