Newbie advice needed pls: Background Noise and Whistling Sound when Recording to PC

sisaogirl

New member
Hi, I'm new here. I'm not a producer of any sort, merely a vocalist/instrumentalist who occasionally needs to send off recordings. I've always used Cubase as I know the platform well and find it userfriendly. I've recently started using my home set up again and am finding big problems when recording. No matter what I do I am finding a whooshing/whistling sound behind all my recordings and whilst monitoring. I've tried bypassing my mixer and going straight into PC, I've tried a different mic, lead, tried my electric piano, tried Ableton rather than Cubase...still the noise!
Yet when I first boot up my PC and try listening to the Line Input through the Windows 'Recording Devices' settings it sounds perfectly clear. Through a series of eliminations I'm starting to believe that this problem is due to some sort of ASIO setting but I don't know enough about this. I'm losing the will to live with it and desperately need it all to be working again soon. Any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks again
Cecilia
 
Hi Cecilia and welcome to the madhouse!

The first thing to do is post a list of the gear in your rig. All we know at the moment is that you have 'a' Cubase and a PC (lap? desk?) and 'a' mixer.

You mention "ASIO" drivers? Well they would only be moot if you had a fairly decent Audio Interface.

A crumb of possible comfort. The setting in the PC Sounds Panel may have been changed, most notably the Level setting for recording. For 'line in' sounds or signal from say a USB mixer, that usually need to be set to 5% from the default 100%. We don't even know your Operating System!

Your location can often be useful? Money, mains V .....

Dave.
 
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Hi Dave thanks for getting back to me.
Ok so my set up is not very high tech at all..I have Windows 7, and old Soundcraft Notepad 102 mixer (which I originally bought for mixing live acoutsic sets), SM58's, Roland Piano, and software options of Cubase SX, and Ableton Live 9 Suit (which I'm not acustomed with yet). All sounds very old school however it all worked when I was using my old PC (on Windows XP) back in the UK, I've now moved to Barcelona and am using same set up and version of Cubase, however a HP Pavilion PC with Windows 7, Realtek Soundcard. Should be slightly better in theory as the PC is slightly better but for some reason it all isn't gelling together this time :/.

Thanks again
Cecilia
 
Right Sis! I am pretty sure it is as I suspected, you have much too high a record level set in W7.

Start with the two wee arrows bottom right left of date/time. Open it and R click on the speaker icon. You will get something similar to the attachment but setups can vary and you might be in for some creative clicking!
Whatever, I am sure you will find the record level is slammed to 100% (mine is at 50%). You need to pull this back to probably 5%, maybe less.

Do you run the laptop headphone output back to the mixer? If so the level might also need some tweaking. VERY roughly, when waffle into a mic blips the "0" LED on the mixer* the DAW software should hit about -12dBFS. This is for a 16bit system which is, I am sure you have, if it were 24 bits (see later) you would shoot for -18dBFS and peaks no higher than -8dB or so. Once you have these levels sorted going IN you can adjust playback to taste.

I shall be first in the Q to tell you to get a proper Audio Interface. You can keep the mixer, could be very useful especially if at some point you can spring for an AI with 2 mic and two further line inputs. I shall (of course!) suggest the Native Instruments KA6.

*I don't have the Soundcraft but that is a decent starting point

Dave.
 

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Once you get your immediate issues taken care of, the next step is to get a proper USB Audio Interface.
 
Once you get your immediate issues taken care of, the next step is to get a proper USB Audio Interface.

+1 and since you have a Roland piano, digital I assume, and Cubase, look for AIs that have MIDI DIN connectors. These will allow you to connect other MIDI devices into the system as you progress.

The two Roland pianos I found HAVE MIDI capability but only via USB so there is no way to connect other MIDI gear. The KA6 is, of course, so endowed.

Dave.
 
Great, thanks!
So, this is where I'm at. As you rightly suspected, the levels in the Windows settings were indeed too high, I have now lowered this to 5%.
Now then, yes that whoosing sound has gone, which is great and a start!! The issue I now seem to have is that there is a crackle on recordings in Cubase, not only fresh vocal recordings but also when playing a track i.e. the beat that my producer friend sent me now seems to crackle when I pay it back, and then when I record a vocal track for it...this crackles when I pay it back too. It's always bloody something isn't it lol!!!
Thanks again!!! Cecilia
 
Once you get your immediate issues taken care of, the next step is to get a proper USB Audio Interface.

Yes, I've mulled over this Audio Interface issue for a while, everyone else I know who records has one, but since my set up used to work efficiently and produced good quality recordings I never bothered changing anything, especially since having lived off only a musicians wage for years I'm always trying to save money. But maybe it's time to save up for one...what are the advantages, if you have time to explain.
Thanks Cecilia
 
Great, thanks!
So, this is where I'm at. As you rightly suspected, the levels in the Windows settings were indeed too high, I have now lowered this to 5%.
Now then, yes that whoosing sound has gone, which is great and a start!! The issue I now seem to have is that there is a crackle on recordings in Cubase, not only fresh vocal recordings but also when playing a track i.e. the beat that my producer friend sent me now seems to crackle when I pay it back, and then when I record a vocal track for it...this crackles when I pay it back too. It's always bloody something isn't it lol!!!
Thanks again!!! Cecilia
Can you post a short bit of the beat or your track so we can look/listen?
 
Yes, I've mulled over this Audio Interface issue for a while, everyone else I know who records has one, but since my set up used to work efficiently and produced good quality recordings I never bothered changing anything, especially since having lived off only a musicians wage for years I'm always trying to save money. But maybe it's time to save up for one...what are the advantages, if you have time to explain.
Thanks Cecilia

I have the time but first. The Crackle. I am going to bet this is a "buffer" setting in Cubase. Now I HAVE a version of Cubase, ess 6 but that is getting on a bit and I have not used it for over a year so I shall leave it to a Cubase expert here to advise. Basically you need to increase the buffer size in Cubase but this actually feeds into Audio Interfaces!

You might know that to record and play music you need an Analogue to Digital Converter (rec') and a Digital to Analogue Converter to play back the audio. These processes take time. Not a lot! But some and that time is called "Latency". VERY simply, that latency is set in the PC system by buffers, v short term storage systems that give the processor time to, err, Process! Not enough time and you get clicks, stutters and yes, crackles. Might NOT be that of course! I could be inflated by my first success! But a fair bet.

One of the main ways to reduce latency and hence buffer size is a good interface and even MORE important than that is good "Drivers" for that interface. The KA6 I mentioned is one of the best AIs around for low latency at its price and its drivers are better than anything I know of sub $1000! That said, the latest generation Focusrites are now said to be good as is the Steinberg UR22 and the Tascams. Many people are recommending the very, er, cost effective! Behringer interfaces but I have yet to see a good, independent report on its latency performance.

AIs, especially these days tend to have good, low noise mic pre amps (but probably no better than those on your mixer*), at least on high impedance input for guitar. Even the basic ones will make building songs a much easier experience and you will generally have a much quieter and 'solid' system to work with.

*If you chose an AI a little up market from the norm' one with two mic inputs but also two extra 'line' inputs, you could connect your mixer to the latter and have 4 track recording, could be handy recording with pals?

The KA6 has such extra line ins of course but to be fair so do many others.

+ I am guessing that HP laptop is no Deep Thought? Not really a problem but you might be a bit low on memory? I am actually typing on an HP i3 Pavillion g6 and it had 4G of ram for a long time and worked fine. I was a bit flush one week and decided to max it out to 8G.Cannot say it made a huge diff' but 4G is definitely the minimum for audio work.
Dave.
 
Well, a strange thing happened, I attempted to post a short clip from the track I'm working with so that people could examine the crackle if they so wish but when I exported it to .wav , the wav file no longer made the crackle sound, my next step I guess is to try exporting a sample of my vocal acapella to see if the same phenomenon occurs.
With regards to the PC, it's a HP Pavillion Desktop PC as opposed to a laptop, it's only used for this purpose and has a lot of memory, my friend even shoved in some extra ram etc before I left for Spain, and since this set up worked for year with the previous inferior PC I think we can probably eliminate the PC power from the issue.
 
Well, a strange thing happened, I attempted to post a short clip from the track I'm working with so that people could examine the crackle if they so wish but when I exported it to .wav , the wav file no longer made the crackle sound...
This does kind of confirm that it's a setting in your DAW that's causing lost blocks during realtime processing. So, seconding [MENTION=89697]ecc83[/MENTION]'s recommendation to futz with buffer size setting and see if that makes a difference. (Exporting the track is a non-realtime process, so buffer size will not impact it like listening does.)
 
I took a few days away from the problem as it was driving me crazy but now I'm back it, have tried changing the buffer size setting in the general Cubase settings but it doesn't seem to make any difference at the moment, unless there is something I'm missing. I also opened up a fresh Cubase project and imported the audio file and strangely at this current moment it's not crackling in that particular project...strange again. Also, I'm finding that although the whistling has gone whilst recording, I'm only getting a very low wave for the vocal and when I increase this so that I can hear it against the track...well then I can here distortion again. Might be time for a whole new set up.
 
I took a few days away from the problem as it was driving me crazy but now I'm back it, have tried changing the buffer size setting in the general Cubase settings but it doesn't seem to make any difference at the moment, unless there is something I'm missing. I also opened up a fresh Cubase project and imported the audio file and strangely at this current moment it's not crackling in that particular project...strange again. Also, I'm finding that although the whistling has gone whilst recording, I'm only getting a very low wave for the vocal and when I increase this so that I can hear it against the track...well then I can here distortion again. Might be time for a whole new set up.

Don't think there is any "might" about it!

Attached are two spectra. The "A&H" is a pretty good USB mixer but is a bog S, 'generic' 16bit USB audio system. You can see the mess!. In practice those spikes (once Win gains are properly set!) are well below ambient noise for the mixer's intended purpose, recording live bands but if you crank the replay gain on a low level recording the noises WILL intrude. N.B. That mixer, just adequate tho' it is is WAY better than most 16 bit cheap recorders.

Compare the 24bit* recording of the baseline noise of my NI KA6 interface. Not only is the average level some 12dB lower but there is an almost complete absence of spikes (even the one you can see is probably due to my hurried setup)

So, you desperately need an external Audio Interface to get you clean recordings. Be aware, noise might still be a problem but it will likely be just noise EXTERNAL to the system. You should at least be free of 'whistles'!

*In practice the spectra are of 16 bit exports. The KA6 recording was done at 24/44.1kHz but Right Mark Analyser can only handle 16 bit .wavs . No matter, it is the MESS we are interested in! Note too that the R/H dB scale is 'wrong' ? I do not have a -122dBFS (there are a few!) system, more -100dBFS for the KA6.

Dave.
 

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