i am having problems with stuttering on my sb live! value card. this has started after i switched motherboards to a soyo kt333 dragon plus. now it stutters during playback on media player and to a lesser extent in winamp. it stutters whether playing mp3's or cd's. it does not crackle or make static noises like a lot of other people with the via chipsets and the sb live boards experience. this is a stutter, like a pause in the playback that lasts maybe half a second. like if someone is saying the word "playback", it will stutter like this: "plaaaaaaaaayback". this is going to drive me nuts because i upgraded my system so i can make songs more efficiently. but if this thing is going to do this, i might as well go back to my p-3/550. the weird thing is, the sound does not stutter in the game i am re-playing through, "unreal". but it does stutter in media player 8 and winamp! machine: soyo dragon kt333 plus 256mb kingston value ram athlon 2100+ retail (not overclocked) hercules prophet 4500 agp sb live value pci creative labs 52x cdrom two maxtor hd (main is 60 gb and is NTFS) windows xp pro sp1 the sb live is on its own irq. it is in pci slot 2. i tried switching slots to slot 3 and the pc won't boot up there. i tried slot 4, and its the same problem. i have no other pci cards in the machine. the onboard audio and lan are disabled in the bios. windows shows no conflicts. i also tried the via 4-in-1 driver update. i am running the latest live value driver from creative labs. can anyone help or make some suggestions? thanks

I had this problem with too...go into device manager, click on your primary and secondary ide controllers (each one), go to the advanced settings tab, and make sure that DMA is selected for both transfer modes. I was having a problem with my CD-ROM drive stuttering when I played a CD...it was set to the PIO mode. Changing it to DMA if available fixed it. Again, it should be safe to do it to both IDE controllers because it will automatically detect if it needs the PIO mode. Hope That Helps!

I have soundblaster live value card and VIA chipset(Abit MB) and I don't have any problem. However I know people have problems with it with earlier Bios version of my MB. Some even have to disable some bios setting in order to get it work. (Although I admit I never heard of your problem). You best bet is to check if you have a bios update of your MB and also search for a forum or FAQ site for your MB over the internet, as usually you will find one if you have a popular MB, and see if others are having the same problem that you have. Usually this kind of problem will be resolve by new bios version or change some setting in the bios, if it is a hardware issue. Also, try to disable any user program (my software cpuidle has problem with SBLIVE), or roll back to microsoft driver to see if that helps.

my IDE controllers are set to dma if available.. im going to try different drivers and then as a last resort, switch back to a pci 128 to see if that makes any difference.. the thing is, it works fine in "unreal" but not in media player! makes me think there is some software thing going on, not hardware.