Popping sound - guitar on Cakewalk

[iam_NOTREAL]

Hi everyone,

Using Cakewalk 4.0 with an Audix i5 mic up to my amp - just trying to do basic recording to share ideas w/ my buddies via mp3.

My problem is that every time I record my guitar, I get an irritating popping or clapping near the peak of each waveform in the recording.

I don't think this is peaking - the audio meter is nowhere near the red. I have tried all manner of settings for recording, guitar, and amp volumes, and the popping or clapping crops up even on low volumes.

I have adjusted mix latency and buffers - the popping slows down or speeds up, but never disappears altogether.

I have defragmented my hard drives, tried saving my files as .cwb and defragging that way - no luck.

I have disabled my antivirus program and killed background applications.

My computer is fairly new and has 1.66Ghz processor speed and 1.99Mb of RAM.

I'd appreciate any ideas that anyone out there has...thanks in advance...

[BentRabbit]

What are you using as an interface?

You'll want to make sure your sample rates on your interface match your Sonar settings...

[iam_NOTREAL]

By interface, meaning the connection from the microphone to the computer?

All I have is an MXL "Mic Mate" with a "Hi-Med-Lo" power switch.

Default sampling rate within Cakewalk is set to 44100.

I'm very new to this, so sorry for the ignorance...

[wrgkmc]

Check your computer with this tool. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

It will reveal weather your system has sufficiant resources available to record.

If you run the program and get peaks in the red, they are what are causing the pops and noise.

USB is a host slave interface and can be interrupted by other applications running so its not best suited to recording. Use a high Latency setting in the recording program and it should make the noise go away


Recording PCs need to be optimised to do one thing, Record. There are a bunch of things that can be done to improove recording performance. Disable or remove all unnessasary cards like network cards. remove all software not directly needed for recording or go into msconfig from the run menu and shut off all unnessasary programs from running when booting. Shut off unnessasary services. Go into control panel, Syetem Hardware Manager, Advanced and set the performance for background services, set visual effects for performance, dump screen savers and desktop pictures, shut off power management, set virtual memory properly, shut off disk cashing, install the latest ASIO drivers, Shut off antivirus, auto updates, system restore plus about 25 other items that can improve audio recording performance.

You can Google up, Optimising windows XP for recording and find details on how its done.

As a final note, If you're going to use the computer for recording and doing other things like surfing the net, data processing, etc you may want to set up a dual boot drive. The second drive can be completely stripped of anything but the OS and and your recording program used for recording only.

In many cases The built in sound card line in which is a stereo input will do just as good a job as these cheapo USB interfaces. You just need a 1/8" stereo jack cable. The other ends are usually RCA but you can get som RCA to 1/4" adaptors and plug into a guitar effects unit, a mixer or something else that will amplify the guitar up to line level.