By Peter Daley
Foobar2000, and Asio4All are designed specifically to improve the playback quality of the sound from Windows computer, and as a bonus they're free!
Foobar2000 is a free, efficient and friendly media player without the program bloat. Some of the media players that most of you are using are over seventy megs and growing just to download. Once installed these modern media players are multiple times bigger that my original computer hard drive on which I did everything! They're very resource hungry, and not very intuitive to use.
Foobar2000 is light weight 2.8 meg download, and once installed it opens instantly, places very little load on your computer resources and does the job it is designed to do better, and with more efficiently than other overweight players, plus as a bonus you also get better playback sound quality. It supports these formats natively, MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA. Because it is light weight it works great on older computers.
Foobar2000
It has an inbuilt equalizer and tabbed play list browsing. I find it very intuitive to use. You can stream your music through it off the Internet. There are also third party programs that work with it to do specialized tasks.
Asio4all allows you to bypass the primitive Windows sound processing, and get better sound quality playback. Asio4all can be started in two ways from a desktop icon, or from a plug in you can add to your media player. Foobar2000 has a Aiso4all plug in available. Aiso4all can activated from the desktop icon before you start your media player if your the player does not have a Asio4all plug in.
Asio4 All
http://tippach.business.t-online.de/asio4all/intro.html
If you use Foobar2000 and Aiso4All in conjunction with the advice I gave in one of my previous blogs you can get even better sound quality playback.
The better quality the computer, headphones, speakers or the HiFi system you use to playback the sound from your computer the more you will notice the sound quality improvement.
© Peter Daley 2009
Disclaimer: This is an amateur volunteer run service. Human error can provide incorrect information, and equipment malfunction can produce false readings. Do not rely on, or take action upon information presented on this web site or at SCCC activities, without further research. Views expressed in the pages, images, or tutorials on the SCCC Inc., web site or presented at venues, maybe the personal opinions of the relevant writers or presenters, and are not necessarily representative of those of SCCC Inc.
Leave a Reply