BTW: That directsound plugin you mentioned resamples the output to 48 kHz where AC97-compatible soundcards (like SB Live! and Audigy) won't resample. Non-AC97 -soundcards won't benefit from this (resampling to 48 kHz) at all since they don't have this nasty habit of resampling in the first place.
Also one good mp3-plugin for Winamp is the MAD-plugin. It has several handy features: dithering, auto attenuation and resolutions from 8 to 32 bits. Get it at: http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin
Yes that is very true. I beleive there are also many other soundcards (other than AC97 that is) that have been plaqued with the resampling issues. It naturally consumes some CPU cycles though.
>AC97-compatible soundcards (like SB Live! and Audigy) won't resample.
AC97 soundcard do resample !
The first thing to do is going to the control panel/multimedia/audio/playback, and set the speakers to "hifi speakers", and the sample rate conversion quality to "best".
Several people whose sound was much improved by the ssrc plugin said that they got exactly the same improvement just changing this Windows setting.
Indeed, some Taiwan guys suggested that AC97 soundcards may perform sampling even if the input is 48kHz. It is because the internal mixing may be done at higher rates like 96kHz and the card will down-sample the result stream to produce a 48kHz output.
