I don't know, I don't use Vista or ASIO4ALL, you can play around with it. Or you can use WASAPI because you use Vista

About dither, I don't know much about it. Read here and here

My card natively support ASIO so I can use that, while you need to use ASIO4ALL. May I know what model of your Realtek is? Like ALC888, ALC882 etc.

Alright yours is capable of bitperfect out. All you got to do is use WASAPI/ASIO/Kernel Streaming and don't use any sort of feature or DSP from both foobar or your soundcard control panel.

Have you tried WASAPI? Also I forgot how to configure sound in Vista, but set it to 16-bit 44.1kHz on sound properties in Windows Control Panel IIRC

You don't need more than 16-bit 44.1kHz for music, if you want to achieve bitperfect output use that setting. ASIO/KS/WASAPI sounds the same (I tried ASIO and KS, sound the same to me), just use WASAPI since you use Vista

if you didn't hear any improvement.. why go to all the trouble changing the output.. trust your ears.

trusting your hearing is a hard thing?

can default skin produce album art? 

I tried paste album art using foobar2k, unsuccessful however. Then I resort to use Mp3Tag to put album art to all FLACs or MP3s

You can try using this. Alternatively if you do group your favorite artists and all its album on their own separate folder, just put their album art picture in that folder, and rename it to 'folder.jpg'

Read at the bottom of the page right here

Open up foobar, go to Preferences (shortcut Ctrl+P), expand Display, click on Album Art Panel and select Sources. On selected code, change from folder.jpg to wildcard (*.jpg), then foobar should read whatever your picture filename would be, as long as it jpg format

whn u install a new version of fb2k replace d old one, ur settins will automaticly apply to the new version, if u wanna keep ur settin for special purpose like for another pc o else, go get a backup at
C:\Documents and Settings\[ur user name]\Application Data\foobar2000

Read at the bottom of the page right here

Open up foobar, go to Preferences (shortcut Ctrl+P), expand Display, click on Album Art Panel and select Sources. On selected code, change from folder.jpg to wildcard (*.jpg), then foobar should read whatever your picture filename would be, as long as it jpg format

My patient is getting thinner with Vista, if it's the problem.
I installed Foobar latest version and have all the setting done. Playing 320kbps mp3 sounds great with my Edifier S2.1D via spdif.
I just found out that it can't handle APE even with the correct codec from K-Lite installed. I tried the same file with VLC and WMP, both works. VLC may have its own codec, but definitely not WMP. This shows that the Monkey Audio codec is indeed installed. Now why Foobar is giving me error?
I got hundreds of APE and I like Foobar to play it... thoughts?

Should I just uninstall K-Lite and install the CCCP?

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Added on November 16, 2008, 9:00 pm

Problem solved. It seems Foobar can't handle ffdshow audio, so even the APE codec was installed via K-lite codec pack, foobar couldn't use it. I have installed the Monkey's Audio component now.

add a new sort order, use:

[%album artist% - ]['['%date%']' ][%album% ]['[Disc '%discnumber%']']

Obsolete or not, the purpose of using ASIO4ALL is to get bitperfect out from your card, it doesn't matter how old is the driver

currently using creative 24 bit ext. i want to know the best configuration for this sound card. thx

i dont think so.....