Now it's enough.

I can't remember when exactly it started, but probably about a month ago or so, whenever my computer plays music it acts as if it's a skipping CD. Sometimes the music will just get garbly to the point where it's just not even possible to play music on my computer any more. At first I thought my speakers might be crappy, but I've gone through three sets of speakers and the problem ensues, so I'm thinking it must be my media players or something in my computer. Problem is, I'm totally lost when it comes to these kinds of things, so I was wondering if any of you could help me solve this dilemma? Is there anything I need to check or anything that would need to be fixed? It seems to work for all types of music I play (whether it be Mp3, or a PSF or what-have-you), on any type of media player, though videos work fine. Does anyone have a clue what could be wrong here? :cat:

Sorry for the long-winded post, but I do want to be able to listen to music on my computer without it messing up all the time. :cat:

Edit: It seems YouTube videos also have this issue sometimes.

Are you on a desktop, and is it fairly old? Or maybe had a power surge/outage or something? There's a chance that your sound card could be on the fritz. Though if videos work fine, it might not be that.

I know no way of testing to see if that's the problem, short of replacing the sound card.

Edit: Do a couple of virus scans as well, just to be safe.

It could very well be your soundcard, I say you could either go get that checked out, or buy a really cheap new one to see if it does the same thing.

If it happens in YouTube as well as with CDs, it could be your processor.
Try with a large media file (rip a CD as WAV files or something), and see if it happens then. If it was your processor, it would skip when you tried to play it.

Are you able to play games from CDs? If you aren't then it's more likely your CD drive.

Is it skipping as in repeatedly starting and stopping, but without skipping any part of the song? Or is the sound cutting out and then resuming having skipped OVER some part of the music? It may be hard to tell, if the skips are too small, but if you can tell this it would help.

The former (starting and stopping) is almost certainly a software problem, e.g. your computer doesn't have the resources (free CPU cycles, RAM etc.) to play music properly. The latter (skipping right over bits of music) is potentially a hardware problem, for example a bad sound card, bad cabling between your card and your speakers etc. That's my guess anyways.

Another thing you can try is boot from a LiveCD of a different OS and see if you can play music from there OK. http://www.knoppix.org/ for example.

I'm afraid you guys are going to have to explain this to me in simple terms, because I really am clueless to alot of things regarding computers. :(

I never really play CDs on my computer, I'm referring to playing files on my computer like mp3s and psfs and what-not. Unne, it seems like it just stops and starts again really fast, like that kind of skipping. This didn't start up until at least a month or so ago, it worked just fine back then.

I also notice it happens usually when something is loading, starting up, or I'm downloading something, though wouldn't it play normally even if that happens? Or is that in fact the normal behavior? :cat:

Thank you for all of your advice. :cat:

Your computer is having trouble handling all the stuff going on at once, so in layman's terms, it's too slow, or something is bogging down your computer.

How old is your PC, and if it's relatively recent, how much stuff do you have running at one time (including background stuff that just sits in the system tray, next to the clock)?