Exported song sound significantly worse? Maybe this is the reason

BBallMick

Hi.

TLDR; Playing song in the Maschine 2 software was crisp and clean. Playing the exported .WAV song in the default Windows music player sounded horrible. Remembered that the software of my gaming headset was applying an equalizer preset which altered the sound when not played back through the ASIO4ALL interface.

Last week I got myself a Maschine Mk3, and have been playing with it ever since.

Today I finally decided to try and actually export a song to an actual .WAV audio file.

So I exported the song with the default export settings, closed the Maschine 2 software (in order to remove the audio playback exclusivity which it takes whenever it's running.) and played the exported .wav file using the default Windows 10 audio player.

And to my surprise, it sounded horrible. In this case it sounded muffled maybe a tad under watery-ish.

I could not understand this since the song was playing perfectly in the Maschine 2 software.

I tried to export the same song using all the different combinations of export options with little to no effect in sound quality of the exported file.

After a lot of digging around the internet i found a bunch of people experiencing sort of the same thing, but none of the answers really helped my situation (And it might not have helped theirs neither).

Anyway, after ****** around for like an hour, I finally realized that while playing in Maschine 2 sfotware the audio is played back through the ASIO4ALL audio interface which I am using, since I do not own any external sound cards/interfaces and just rely on whatever is in the motherboard of my Windows 10 computer.

Now, when I exit the Maschine 2 software I also no longer listen to audio playback through the ASIO4ALL, instead I'm using whatever Windows 10 uses by default.

However I remembered my gaming headphones also comes with some software which you can use to apply some equalizer presets to enhance the sound for specific gaming genres. And lo and behold, when I turned this off, the audio, when playing the exported file in the Windows 10 default music player, was no longer ****** and all my troubles disapeared. Tadaa!

I hope my frustrating little journey here can help some other poor novice musical soul.