iTunes 7 audio clipping

[Sesshi]

I wrote about this before but it's occured to me that perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I've used the same track as last time and it clips in exactly the same places (as it does in many other tracks which play perfectly fine on the iPod, iTunes 6 and on the PC in software other than iTunes 7) as 7.0.

Volume is set full, Sampling rate in the Audio MIDI Setup is 44.1khz of course and the rest is how it is in the pic. Sorry about the 'smearing' - I used Unsharp Mask for the text to show up better while resizing the image to be smaller.

Is there anything I'm missing in terms of the audio setup? Only analog outputs 1 & 2 are active on this soundcard and they're set up as left/right in Audio MIDI Setup. It's definitely clipping at the source - I can adjust the volume of the outputs and it just clips quieter.

Unless I switch on the Equalizer and pull the preamp down a notch, iTunes won't play without clipping to the analog outputs nor the headphones. I don't think I got any replies when I posted this last, isn't anyone else out there experiencing digital clipping in iTunes 7?

 

[rjzastrow]

I have the same problem - clipping

I agree it is definitely at the source - iTunes clips at the same times in the songs (on my PC only - songs play fine on the iPod. I doubled my memory from 1 to 2 gig hoping this would fix it - no difference.

I, too, am perplexed and would welcome help from anyone who has fixed this issue. I have not yet started to play around with audio settings.

 

[Sesshi]

I got an interesting resolution to this problem. I set the output sampling rate to 176.4K and bitwidth to 32, and the problem went away. The only problem this seems to bring up is that iTunes crashes more than it used to.

I was so pleased I got it to work I haven't done much in the way of experimentation but the bitwidth seems to be more important than the sampling rate. Makes sense (increasing bitwidth increases the dynamic range) but why would I need it? That's the odd thing. Your card may not support the bitwidth and sampling rate I mentioned, but try raising the bitwidth - most cards support 24 bits these days.

This could of course be down to iTunes 7 doing some odd resampling of its own - my listening to iTunes has only been of the casual sort since my switch to V7 but if that is the case it would suck. Perhaps just as well I'm moving back to a Windows-based HTPC with a non-iTunes media client for my living room.