Off topic: Win2k Volume?

I just upgraded one of my machines from Windows NT4 to Windows 2000. I like the OS (although a few of its new features are irritating and I had to figure out how to turn them off), but it has one strange quirk, and I want to know if anyone knows why this is happening and how to fix it...

The volume levels (as set in the taskbar volume control applet) are WAY louder than they were under NT4.

For instance, under NT 4, most of the volume sliders would be at about the 75% position to get the appropriate volume out of my headphones. The master volume would be at about 50% (or higher if I wanted to crank it).

Under Windows 2000, those settings would blow my speakers/headphones. Now I have to have most of the sliders at 30% or so, and the master volume is comfortable at about 15%, and overdriving at anything over 30 or 40%.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

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Tony Fabris

In reply to:

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Under Windows 2000, those settings would blow my speakers/headphones. Now I have to have most of the sliders at 30% or so, and the master volume is comfortable at about 15%, and overdriving at anything over 30 or 40%

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I have noticed this as well, I have access to several machines under Win2K, and unfourtunatly this issue is reflected on ALL machines, not sure why. I just had to manually mess with all the settings. Microsoft doesnt have any info in Technet either. So they must consider this a minor issue.

Very annoying indeed, especially when my main box at home is dual booted with Win98 (quiet) and Win2K (loud!).

Interesting... I have noticed this on my work installation of Win2k. I don't use the Empeg on my computer at home so I have not noticed it was an OS thing. I know that there are issues with Win2k sound drivers. 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?

Anyway, they claimed the only fix was for the OEMs to rewrite their drivers to reflect the change. Maybe this is another symptom of the same problem?

Brian H. Johnson
MK2 36GB Blue
"Born to Lose..."

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

I just got an interesting private e-mail message from Sven Mueller on this subject. He told me something I didn't know...

All right, I've known all along that most sound card drivers have a "pre-gain" flag available on the microphone input. In fact, when I display the advanced controls for the Microphone on this system, there's a checkbox for that very feature, and the mic doesn't work well unless I check that box. This isn't news to me.

What surprised me is to learn that a similar flag exists for the output stage of the card.

This sounds like it could be the root of the problem: Windows 2000 might be activating that flag, but NT4 did not.

The only problem is that Windows 2000 doesn't have a check box for that feature, at least not one that I can see. Does anyone know if there's a registry setting for this feature?

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Tony Fabris

Other great Win2k addtions are:

- the fact that it remembers in "network places" the machines that you have browsed to recently
- the fact that when you type \\machine_name in the run dialog it auto completes the path as you drill-down into a remote machine
- the "iisreset" command that restarts IIS in one go

Worst things (that I turn off straight away on new boxes):

- "personal menus" more usually know as "where the bloody hell has my menu item gone"
- "fading menus" more usually know as "the menu will be along shortly, please be patient"


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Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Worst things (that I turn off straight away on new boxes):
- "personal menus" more usually know as "where the bloody hell has my menu item gone"

Oh, agreed, for sure.

- "fading menus" more usually know as "the menu will be along shortly, please be patient"

That irritates me slightly, but I leave it on because it's a good work-around for an older irritant that never went away. Let me explain:

The fact that the sub-menus appear automatically is sometimes a problem for me in navigating multiple sub-menus. If you don't make your mouse move in the correct maze-like path on the screen, your desired sub-menu often disappears in favor of another sub-menu (because your mouse accidentally passed over the wrong sub-menu on the way to the desired icon).

So when I'm traversing menus quickly, I have been known to pick the wrong menu item. (And no one has any right to make fun of me- I know it's happened to you, too.)

The nice thing about the fading menus is that they fade out, too. So if I pick the wrong menu item, I get a fade-out picture of the item I selected for a second after I've done it. Then I at least know what I did wrong and can start thinking about corrective measures.

It would be neat if the menus appeared instantly but still faded out, that would be cool.

Of course, the best option would be to make it so an actual click is required to make a sub-menu appear, but that annoyance has been present since Win95 and doesn't show any signs of going away.

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Tony Fabris

it would be neat if the menus appeared instantly but still faded out, that would be cool.

Heh, I love serendipity. I just installed TweakUI version 1.33 and it allows this exact feature. I've attached TweakUI to this message if anyone wants it.


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Tony Fabris

Heh, I love serendipity.

Here's a scary bit of trivia for you. You and I are the only two people who have ever used that word on this bbs.

Oh... and I used it first, so nerny-nerny-nerny!

tanstaafl.




"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Another useless piece of trivia (In an effort to go further off topic) I'm the only person to have used the word Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobwllllantisiliogogogoch on this BBS... =P

(It's the name of a Welsh railway station, and it translates into English as "The church of St Mary in the hollow of the white hazel close to a rapid whirlpool and the church of St Teilo near a red cave.")

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Maybe you are the only two people that have spelt it correctly.

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341

In reply to:

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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.

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Wow, that's impressive! That's almost three years after the BeOS had that feature!

Mmmmmm. Be

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

Yeah, the BeOS really impressed me, too bad it didn't go anywhere.

I even played with the free version of it for a while, but deleted it when I realized it didn't come with a Samba client and was useless to me because I couldn't use it on our windows-only network.

Honestly, I'd still be messing around with it if the free version had come with Samba built-in.

What impressed me the most was how simple the configuration was. There were so few options to configure, and the settings were organized in such simple places, that for a while I thought I was missing something. Contrast this with the complete mess called Windows 2000...

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Tony Fabris

In reply to:

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...when I realized it didn't come with a Samba client...

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Er, it might not be built in, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist (as it often does in the Windows world). For instance, I found four references to "samba" at BeBits, including Samba for BeOS, which might very well do what you want. It's a port of the GPL package, so no doubt if there were minor problems you could change it and recompile...

Sometimes, you just have to know where to look.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

Well, I was trying the free version of BeOS right after they released it, and at the time, I was told by the Be support people that:

1) Be's Samba client was deliberately left out of the free version.

2) No, I couldn't get the non-free version of the Samba client to run on the free version. And even if I could, they wouldn't just send it to me anyway.

3) Yes, there was a third-party Samba client in development but it wasn't done yet.

Since the BeOS stuff was just an experiment for me, that was (as far as I was concerned) the end of the experiment since I wasn't really interested in buying the full BeOS just for the experiment.

It's obvious that things have changed since that initial free release, but I'm now past that period where I had a desire to experiment with Be.

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Tony Fabris