Where are these pops coming from?

VomitHatSteve

VomitHatSteve

Hat STYLE. Not contents.
I've tried everything I can think of to get rid of these things, but those freaking pops and clicks keep coming back to plague me.

As things currently stand, I'm running my guitar to my Behringer Eurorack mixer (via a mic), plugging headphones into the mixer shows that my sound is good by the time it reaches that point.

Then I run the RCA outs from the mixer to the RCA ins of my M-audio 24/96 audio card and then into Reaper to record.

By the time I play something back, it's full of obnoxious little pops and clicks. Messing with buffer sizes and latency seems to help a little, but it does not solve the problem. (I don't think it's a reaper thing since Audacity gets this too.)

Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks.
 
Probably has something to do with the clock... What sample rate are you using? Does Reaper support 96k (or 88.2k, assuming your using one of these?) Also is your clock set to internal or external. I'm not very familiar with Reaper but I would say that one of these issues is presenting you with a problem.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
By the time I play something back, it's full of obnoxious little pops and clicks. Messing with buffer sizes and latency seems to help a little, but it does not solve the problem. (I don't think it's a reaper thing since Audacity gets this too.)
Click to expand...

IRQ conflict, maybe... or a poor PCI latency timer setting. I'm assuming you don't have something chewing up lots of cycles in the background like a USB hard drive, an antivirus scanner, or a wireless card not connected to a network.... Try a different slot first (try every slot before giving up) and see if the problem goes away. If not, try tweaking the PCI latency timer settings. Read:

http://www.reric.net/linux/pci_latency.html
http://www.focusrite.com/answerbase/article.php?id=265
 
I used to have problems with my old pci card getting like clicks and pops and turns out it was because my computer power supply was having to power too many things. I had to remove one of the extra hard drives. Also, a faster computer with more ram could help. Like I said, it was my computer that was the problem, not driver settings or software issues. Of course, that doesn't mean it can't be one of those problems, just that it might be something besides those.
 
M10K said:
Wait...is it only during playback? Not when you record?
Click to expand...

I only hear them during playback, but I'm pretty sure they are showing up when I record because they are always in the same places on any given track.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'll get back to you after I've tried some of the suggestions.
 
Ok. I've tried most everything suggested so far. Thank you all for your input.

Matching reaper to my ASIO driver: I can get the sample rates to match, but I don't know if I can set the sample size in the driver. The sample rates were matched before.

Increasing sample rate to 96000 did not help.

IRQ conflict: I was carefult to make sure I didn't have any of those when I built the computer.

PCI issues: I tried putting my sound card in the other PCI slot. That did not help. How would I manually tweak the PCI latency values in Windows XP?

Inadequate hardware: This shouldn't be the problem. this computer is less than a year old and has pretty good specs (2GB RAM, 450 watt power supply, etc.)

It's not a click track.

I'm going to try moving around some wires to see if it's maybe an electrical interference problem or something.

I also de-fragmented my hard drive, which didn't help.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?
 
I had this type of issue the other weekend.

I had downloaded a new version of the same software. When I got rid of the new version and used the previous it went away. Not sure why, but it worked.

Someone mentioned crap running in the background too, thats always a suspect.

good luck...popping an crackling sucks
 
More recent experimentation has shown that this problem is most pronounced when I am micing amplifiers. DI guitars and mic'd vocals aren't too bad, but my mic'd guitars are almost unlistenable.
 
This may seem simple and forgive me if it is something you checked already. Pops and clicks can also mean that you have overdriven the channel on input. You mentioned that it happens when you record guitars. Make sure that at no time are the VU meters going into the red or you will hear distortion. This could be the problem that you had a sound that got a little over the maximum input level of the input which caused distortion. Just my 2 cents as digital is unforgiving when it comes to distortion.
 
I'd start buy eliminating the PC being the cause. Check EVERYTHING, I'm sure there's a bit of stuff helping to slow the recording program down that you don't know about. Read over this link and follow through with most of it. Especially the "performance" section as you'll want to have most power running to your background services, since ASIO runs as this.


http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ts/detail.php?Index=30058
 
Woah! Old thread!

I've got the issue pretty well worked out, I think. I asked around on the Reaper chat as well. I don't remember exactly what ended up being the problem, but I think it was actually a playback issue in the end.

Thank you.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Woah! Old thread!

I've got the issue pretty well worked out, I think. I asked around on the Reaper chat as well. I don't remember exactly what ended up being the problem, but I think it was actually a playback issue in the end.

Thank you.
Click to expand...

Damnit! I didn't even notice the dates. I hate when people bring up a oldie causing you to think it's new. :D
 
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