Severe crackling during audio playback- help!

[We Got Da Funk]

Hello, this is my first post here, looks like a great forum. I ran some searches on past posts but could not find anything definitive to solve my problem. I get severe crackling and popping noises on my computer when playing back audio, especially WAVs but also somewhat on MP3s. At first I thought it was a recording problem but am positive it is not- if I burn recordings to CD then play them back through the CD drive (digital out going to digital in on SB Live- so same D/A converter and speakers), there is no problem. I hear the effect in the demo loops in the FruityLoops 3 demo as well. The effect is worse the more complex the playback program, i.e. Cubase 32 demo vs. Winamp (and gets worse as I add effects in Cubase) and also seems to intensify with signal amplitude, and with time after a track starts playing. Here is what I have in my computer, which I originally assembled in 1999 but have upgraded somewhat since then:
SB Live! (don't laugh, I am just getting into home recording!) w/ latest drivers
Abit BE6 motherboard w/Intel 440BX chipset running @ 100MHz front side bus
PIII 850 MHz CPU
384 MB RAM
7200 RPM IBM 60 GB hard drive, ATA-100, connected to Promise Ultra 100 TX2 ATA-100 PCI card (latest drivers of course)
Diamond Viper 770 video card (nVidia TNT2) w/ latest nVidia "Detonator" drivers
USB ethernet adapter going to DSL modem
Windows 2000, all updates/patches installed (incl. latest DirectX)

I have disabled ACPI in the BIOS and set Device Manager accordingly (actually had to reinstall some device drivers after this), tried disabling all unecessary "start-up" programs (Norton anti-virus, Zonealarm), made sure the SB Live! has its own IRQ (it didn't before I disabled ACPI, now the only things that share an IRQ are the Promise ATA-100 controller and the onboard HighPoint ATA-66 controller which I don't use), even tried disabling USB in the BIOS. Nothing works! I have read elsewhere about adjusting "PCI bridge latency" or something like that but I don't see anything like that in my BIOS settings.

I would like to do some multi-track recording with this setup but am pretty discouraged with it so far. I know the SB Live! is not "serious hardware" but is this really normal? I also realize that my PC is not the fastest out there either but would think it could hold it's own w/its specs- but heck I'm not even multi-tracking yet and audio playback is crackling all to hell! Please help!

 

[Sangram]

Might try defragmenting your HD.

If you can't adjust latency in BIOS you might need to check for the options using WPCREDIT/WPCRSET. The commonly available patch will not work on your system.

I'm sure you've not had this problem since 1999. When did the problem start, and how did it begin?

Try moving the Soundcard to a different slot. I would reinstall 2000 fresh, it acts up sometimes on old installs.

Try connecting your harddrive to the onboard ATA controller. You might get a slight perf. drop, but it might get you a little smoothness.

Is your Power supply OK? Is this happening on all sounds or only what you've recorded?

The last thing I would try is recording in 48 KHz. SB Live! by default samples at that frequency, and downsamples to the required rate as per application requirements. I find recording at 48 KHz seems to solve a lot of problems. It crackles severely when recording at 44.1, but is OK at 48, 32 and 22.

Sang

 

[MONTE]

Also make sure DMA is enabled for all drives.