I'm trying to remember which version of Windows it was that had Media Player default to playing audio CDs digitally. ME? 2000? XP?

I seem to recall this default was troublesome on some low-spec systems because the drives and/or IDE bus were too slow to handle it, and you'd get skipping. So you had people changing the setting in the Media Player preferences, only to find their drive didn't have the analog audio hooked up to their sound card! 😁

I think Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000 both allowed digital transfer of audio tracks from IDE optical drives.

Both IDE and SATA can transfer audio digitally, if not by the operating system then by a player/ripper program.

But it wasn't until windows started to make it the default method that the CD drive makers actually put effort into making it return accurately positioned samples.

I started extracting DA on NT4 with scsi Plextors, Nakamichi and Pioneer changers and a Pioneer slot dvd. Definitely prior to W2k.

HwAoRrDk wrote on 2026-08-02, 18:16:

I'm trying to remember which version of Windows it was that had Media Player default to playing audio CDs digitally. ME? 2000? XP?

I seem to recall this default was troublesome on some low-spec systems because the drives and/or IDE bus were too slow to handle it, and you'd get skipping. So you had people changing the setting in the Media Player preferences, only to find their drive didn't have the analog audio hooked up to their sound card! 😁

I feel like I recall a checkbox in Device Manager on 98SE. But maybe it was multimedia preferences instead. And not relevant to Win2000, but on 9X, I believe WDM (rather than VxD) sound drivers may have been required, because in addition to the performance issues, you need software mixing so that .wav files can be played overtop the background track.

jakethompson1 wrote on Today, 04:11:

I feel like I recall a checkbox in Device Manager on 98SE. But maybe it was multimedia preferences instead.

Are you sure it was a device setting? You may be right that it was 98SE that introduced digital playback for Windows Media Player, but I'm pretty sure it was a player-software setting. I have a memory that WinAmp also made digital CD playback the default at some point, perhaps WinAmp 3? (Whichever version it was, it was the one that was a complete rewrite that everyone moaned about being slow, bloated, and didn't support the old skins or plug-ins.)

I never used to use the digital playback, because the added background noise of the CD drive spinning faster was annoying.

jakethompson1 wrote on Today, 04:11:

because in addition to the performance issues, you need software mixing so that .wav files can be played overtop the background track.

There's no doubt that also contributed to the problem on under-spec systems. 😀

HwAoRrDk wrote on Today, 15:41:

Are you sure it was a device setting? You may be right that it was 98SE that introduced digital playback for Windows Media Player, but I'm pretty sure it was a player-software setting. I have a memory that WinAmp also made digital CD playback the default at some point, perhaps WinAmp 3? (Whichever version it was, it was the one that was a complete rewrite that everyone moaned about being slow, bloated, and didn't support the old skins or plug-ins.)

I happened to set up Win98SE last night (got a HOT-597 board \o/ ) and it isn't in device manager, but it is in Control Panel->Multimedia. However, that's probably just a default that each multimedia program can either override when asking Win9x to play a CD track, or the setting in WMP might just bypass the Windows multimedia APIs and go to the drive directly (via ASPI maybe) when digital playback in it is enabled.