Help with popping & cracking sound from pc

[gyles]

Please help. I had a bright idea that I would back up all my MP3 files and DVD's on an external usb 500 gb WD 7200 rpm hard drive and play them from the drive instead of loading and unloading disc's. Well, when I boot up and play a (the first) movie or an mp3 file it sounds great. but, if I change to another movie or mp3 file it pops and cracks so loud and awful you might have heard it and just didn't know what it was;

Anyway, I have a Sound Blaster A2 sound card and a cheap set of Aztec speackers. However, it was not doing this prior to installing the WD 500gb hard drive. Now it does it with or without the WD HD connected.

Please, please, please, I have reseated the sound card, updated drivers, worked on it about 3 days and just can't get it to work right. I want to be able to open the hard drive, play a movie, play another movie or music files... Somebody please have an answer.

Thanks

[Marvingj]

A nifty trick for comparing two .WAV files is to use the "Mix Paste"
feature of an audio editor like Cool Edit. Extract a track twice, then
use Mix Paste to copy an inverted version of one file on top of the other.
The two sound files will cancel each other out wherever they are identical,
and have little spikes where they are different. This can be useful
for seeing if the problems are only on one channel or are happening at
regular intervals.