Sound Cracks

[juicypork]

Hi all,
I'm a newbie so please bear with me. Everytime when my volume goes too high with oh-so-many SOFT-SYNTH instruments being played at the same time, the sound starts to crack. I noticed that when you play it in real-time in cubase, there are more cracks probably because more memory is being used at that time. But the compiled versions also have slight bursts. I was wondering if this is avoidable. Thanks.

[kraley]

Pay attention to the sections on Sound Cards, ASIO drivers, and Latency.

If you are newbie to cubase - you need to review this.

Hope this helps....

[Chris Shaeffer]

You might be clipping. If you have synth up at full volume and your master meters are reading, say, -3dB then you add another at the same level... when they both hit the loud parts they might clip. And a few more and they'll clip more often.

Digital clipping sounds like crap and really stands out. Try turning the volume down on all your tracks. The more tracks you add the more you're going to have to turn them down- there just isn't room for 21 synths at full volume in your mix.

Take care,
Chris

[Chris Shaeffer]

Forgot to mention- here's a trick for dealing with this.

When you go to start mixing, take all your faders down to zero. Then bring up the most important parts of your mix- vocals, bass, drums, leads, whatever. Get them fairly good sounding together with your master meters only hitting around -6dB most of the time.

Then start bringing up the rest of your parts so that they fit in with what you've already mixed. When you start added them in your master meter may start peaking out (almost clipping) every now and then. When that happens, find out what instrument is causing it to peak and either turn it down, EQ out some energy, or decide that something else has to be turned down.

That's a good way to start, at least. You'll get the hang of it in no time.

Enjoy,
Chris

[NathanP]

This may not be applicable to you but I will get the same thing when I set the system for an especially low latency..like 11ms with my KXproject drivers. Personally, I haven't found a good way around this other than rendering the tracks to WAV since the cracks don't show up when not playing live...

Of course, if your goal is to play live this won't be much help.

[werners]

maybe system overload ?
vsti's love to use your cpu to the max

[juicypork]

Alrighty, thanks for the info, all.
I'll take a look at latency.

[hueseph]

I'd have to agree that it's latency/buffer related. When you have a lot of instruments using up cpu power, the more buffer you have, usually, the better. Of course this will increase your latency as well.