Vista - itunes 8

I update itunes a couple of days ago, and now have distortion playing nything in my library. I've disabled the equalizer, change settings in Sound Blaster XFI-Extreme, uninstalled and reinstalled itunes with no change. When using Media Center, the playback is fine, until I start Visualization, then the same distortion. No other programs updated or loaded Ultimate x64, with Quadcore 2.66 and 4GB of memory. Any suggestions?

I am to having the same problem with itunes 8 and my creative x-fi xtreme music. This only occured after I had to do a complete reinstall of my os before then everything was working good. I have tried both versions of the drivers that creative offers for my card and vista home premium and neither one seem to take care of the distortion from itunes. Weird thing is I do not notice it when I use windows media player or winamp to play my files. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Select View/Show Equalizer and adjust it? Switch it off? maybe your X-Fi has it's own EQ set already. Just use Winamp or Foobar2000 to play your tunes and leave iTunes to organise your iPod.

I'm biased though. I hate iTunes

Yeah all the eq's are off on both itunes and x-fi still sounding like crap it is really annoying that you can never get any help from itunes support those people really do suck. Well i guess for now I will do like you said just use itunes to keep my ipod up to date and use winamp to listen.

The distorted sound is 'usually' the result of either too much bass or the pre-amp pushed to far as well as the volume being cranked, or a combination. Seeing as you've turned both EQ's off... I'm tapped for ideas tonight. Simple, unsatisfactory answer = Blame iTunes

One last idea, maybe if you turn the EQ on in iTunes and lower the pre-amp, it might cut the distortion. I'd test it myself, but I'm sick of updating iTunes virtually every time I use it. Which isn't all that often I have to admit So I'm sticking with 7.7 for the time being.

It is just weird I did not have this problem until I did a complete wipe and reinstall of my os. Next thing I will try is take out the x-fi and enable the onboard sound and see if the problem goes away. I did try installing 7.7 itunes and still had the same problem also I noticed that if I am playing winamp and surfing the web winamp will make the same noise that itunes does when it is running. I have two gigs of ram so I do not think thats the problem maybe its a resource conflict somewhere that isn't showing up all the time?

Memory shouldn't be a problem. Grasping at straws here, do you have any codec packs or plug-ins relating to sound/streaming?

Did you update to SP1 etc when you re-installed? Maybe there is a conflict there in that regard?

No new codecs as far as I know also yes I did update to SP 1 but my previous installation also ran SP 1.

Well after removing the creative x-fi and its software and enabling my onboard sound and using the windows drivers it seems all is well now. So caulk this one up to creatives crappy drivers I guess. I kinda figured as much but wanted to try other things first since everything was ok before the reinstall. So for now I will use my onboard until I stumble across another solution.

That's a pity. For such good cards, their drivers are a renowned for being rubbish.