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Comment by jonathanlydall

9 days ago

My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.

23 comments

jonathanlydall

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Waterluvian  9 days ago

I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.

I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?

  • spicyjpeg  9 days ago

    Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.

    Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.

    [1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.

  • kibibu  9 days ago

    They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.

  • wizzwizz4  9 days ago

    Did you ever try using the drive with the computer switched off?

    • hyperman1  8 days ago

      When a computer crashed, cd audio continued to play. My PC just kept playing trough a hard reset/reboot, in fact. It would only stop playing when DOS booted far enough that it loaded mscdex, a step I could skip with a startup menu. I've always wondered why it managed to survive a reset pulse on the wire.

  • Zardoz84  9 days ago

    I remember my father powering one of these old cd ROM drives, without a computer and using it to play music CDs using these jack connecter

darknavi  9 days ago

It's funny because Microsoft Teams does this today, in 2026.

  • jonathanlydall  8 days ago

    I almost didn't believe this, but I just tested and you're absolutely right.

    I've never noticed because I use a Steel Series headset which presents as two output sound devices to Windows, the idea being that you can independently control the volume of your "game" and your "chat" application. Turns out it's useful for Teams as well.

  • arnitdo  8 days ago

    Good solution that works is setting up something like voicemeeter, passing audio through a virtual device and then muting it in vb panel

    • malnourish  8 days ago

      Until you invariably end up dealing with sampling rate disparities and other bugs that lead you to hear crackling or make you sound like a robot.

anyfoo  9 days ago

I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing.

And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for decompressing the video. On the other hand, if you’re already starved for CPU time…

  • jonathanlydall  8 days ago

    I mentioned this in another thread now, but it was definitely noteworthy to me that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.

    • anyfoo  7 days ago

      Winamp had a software equalizer with a preamp, which was noteworthy. Are you sure changing the volume did not mean changing the preamp level in Winamp?

      If you turned off the preamp (could be directly done in the EQ window I think), what did the volume control actually do?

      2 replies →

whycome  9 days ago

That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.

  • jonathanlydall  8 days ago

    It was definitely noteworthy that it did this since I was used to other programs not doing so, for example Winamp, I would also have thought Windows' Media Player did not do this, but I can't remember for certain.