Strange snap crackle pop problem

tlee2951

New member
Hoping some of you home-recording gurus can help me out. I'm new to the forum and relatively new to home recording.

I've had a strange snap crackle pop problem for a while. I've tried a number of things suggested on the forum from earlier posts which have helped some.

My setup is nothing to get too excited about. I'm planning on updating my sound card, software (to Sonar), and PC (in that order) within the next year or so but I'm hoping I can at least get a usable setup before going all the way down that path.

My PC is an HP Pavillion 9000 series running Win 98SE, 192MB RAM, dual hard drives (160G Western Digital 7200 RPM for audio, factory 10G drive for everything else), Create SoundBlaster PCI, Cakewalk HomeStudio 9. I've done alot of MIDI stuff for a while but I'm just starting to do more with audio.

I've done all the Win98 stuff I've seen suggested and have gotten to the point where usually when I record the first audio track it sounds fine, with no snap crackle pop. I usually do everything MIDI first and only do limited audio recording---which is good since HomeStudio9 doesn't give you a whole lot of audio tracks.

Here is the problem:

After the initial audio recording, it seems like nearly anything I do to the audio after that point will result in added snap-crackle-pop in the modified audio.

For example I usually like to normalize my audio tracks but when I take a perfectly clean original audio track and normalize it, the result almost always has new pops.

Same thing happens when I take my audio tracks and do a "mixdown to file" within HomeStudio.

Even stranger to me still is that often just by copying a perfectly good .WAV file to somewhere else, the copied .WAV now has new snap, crackle in it. I can pull up both .WAV files in Cakewalk and look at them and they look identical except that the noisy one has noticeable spikes in the waveform that match where the pops occur. I noticed also that some of the demo audio tracks that install with HomeStudio that look good on the CD are full of pops after being copied to the hard drive during install.

The .WAVs I've experimented with are all stereo wav's and I've also noticed that these pops seem to always show up in only the Stereo-Right portion of the waveform.

Anyone else dealt with this problem or have an idea? I first thought all my problems were soundcard related but now I don't know if it's Cakewake HS9 or Win9x or drivers or just my crappy PC (I woudn't recommend HP Pavillion to ANYONE).

If anyone can help me figure this problem out I will be eternally grateful.

Also are there other forums better suited to this type of question?I've looked around a bit and this one seems to be one of the best.

Many thanks.
 
It really sounds to me like your harddrive has a problem, if processing a track after recording produces pops and crackles. Do you have DMA activated for your drives?



tlee2951 said:
For example I usually like to normalize my audio tracks but when I take a perfectly clean original audio track and normalize it, the result almost always has new pops.
Just another example that normalizing should be forbidden by law. ;) Sorry, couldn't resist.
 
tlee2951, repeat after me, never, never use the Normalise command:(
But why, oh Master? Because it is destructive, you cannot reverse it without degrading the audio quality. ;)
 
Thanks for the feedback. I'll go back through the earlier links dealing with snap crackle issues and see if there is something I haven't tried yet. I see at least one person with Win98 problems didn't see the problem go away until they upgraded their OS, in their case from Win98 to 98SE. I've already got 98SE so I don't know if maybe I've got an old driver or something causing my grief.

I will be getting an Echo Gina24 in the next while, it will be interesting to see if that has any effect. My plans to purchase the Gina24 are not really related to this problem, I've been wanting an easy way to record straight digital from my synths (roland fantom and alesis qs8) and the Gina24 seems to fit the bill nicely with both SPDIF and Alesis lightpipe support for their tosling digital i/o port.

Since I'm seeing pops being introduced AFTER recording I'm thinking the Gina24 won't help, unless there is a playback issue involved. The really baffling thing to me is when I see new pops introduced after doing nothing but copying and renaming an originally good .wav file. I think I'll run a "diff" on the before and after .wav files to determine if there is actual binary corruption in the resulting .wav file or if something else is going on.

As far as the normalize debate, I didn't realize this was such a religious issue with people. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what normalize does, I've been thinking all it does is raise the overall level of the audio so the loudest part of the signal is right at the max level just shy of where things would clip.

As far as the destructive aspects of it, it seems that whenever I do "undo normalize" in Cakewalk I get the original waveform back pure and undefiled.

Someone please enlighten me further on the evils of normalization as I am still an eager and teachable young "grasshopper" in the home recording world, looking for any wisdom available from the masters out there.
 
tlee2951 said:
As far as the normalize debate, I didn't realize this was such a religious issue with people. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what normalize does, I've been thinking all it does is raise the overall level of the audio so the loudest part of the signal is right at the max level just shy of where things would clip.

As far as the destructive aspects of it, it seems that whenever I do "undo normalize" in Cakewalk I get the original waveform back pure and undefiled.

Someone please enlighten me further on the evils of normalization as I am still an eager and teachable young "grasshopper" in the home recording world, looking for any wisdom available from the masters out there.

Heh heh heh :D
Just don't take it so hard, dude :D It's just the usual way we (regular Cakey forumists) work. You seem to know the idea of normalizing, the point is, we cannot just trust the normalizing system to do exactly that way :) So far, we just didn't see the good one, so usualy we trust Compresor instead for doing such a job :)

Anyway, about your problem, I curious about one of the driver installed in your system. Once I get the crackle-crackle sound back then when I use ASUS mobo and installed it's firmware driver (4 in 1 driver). Or it could be the soundcard's driver or your VGA card. Uninstall them one by one and see if it helps, or beter yet, update the driver while available :)

Hope it helps.
;)
Jaymz
 
Even a quick visit of Windows Update could be helping a little. Sometimes Microsoft does something good. ;)
 
Could be your soundcard too close to your graphics card. Or your interupt assignments clashing.
 
Thanks for the many suggestions. I played around last night a bit, did a Windows update and loaded some newer drivers for the sound card. Things still about the same.

But, Paul881 I think you may be on to something with the interrupt sharing idea. I noticed last night late that my video and sound cards are both sharing int 11, AND they sit in adjacent PCI slots. I tried manually changing one of the interrupts but Windows in its superior wisdom wouldn't let me (at least not easily).

So I'll go try the game of changing PCI slots, removing and re-adding hardware to see if I can get the Sound card on it's own interrupt. I was too tired to delve into this last night but I'm re-energized and eager to resume the battle tonight.

One question on drivers: I noticed the newer SoundBlaster PCI drivers I loaded were WDM drivers instead of the older .VXD style. Seems like I heard for 98SE that the older style are a bit more stable. Anyone have an opinion on this?

From the little bit of experimenting I did last I couldn't see that the WMD driver was particularly better or worse than the older one as far as recording/playback, but it did offer some new features (like surround sound, MIDI effects, etc).

Also one final thought: I have been repeating the following mantra all day....

"Thou shalt not normalise....."
"Thou shalt not normalise...."
"Thou shalt not normalise....."
 
tlee2951 said:
One question on drivers: I noticed the newer SoundBlaster PCI drivers I loaded were WDM drivers instead of the older .VXD style. Seems like I heard for 98SE that the older style are a bit more stable. Anyone have an opinion on this?

From the little bit of experimenting I did last I couldn't see that the WMD driver was particularly better or worse than the older one as far as recording/playback, but it did offer some new features (like surround sound, MIDI effects, etc).

Also one final thought: I have been repeating the following mantra all day....

"Thou shalt not normalise....."
"Thou shalt not normalise...."
"Thou shalt not normalise....."
I don't think there should be any difference between WDM and MME in Win98, but if you suspect that, you can always force Sonar to use MME-drivers. (Options -> Audio -> Always use MME-drivers, even...).


And the mantra sounds like the right way to live... :D
 
HOORAY!!!!!!! I think we've found the culprit! After moving my sound card to a different slot and letting the Win98 plug-n-play stuff do it's thing, I was able to lay down 8 tracks of audio (about a min. each in length) with nary a single pop or crackle. I've NEVER been able to do that before. I may be jumpin' the gun a bit here but I'm thinking the problem is solved.

I notice now that after the card shuffling, my sound card now has interrupt 5 pretty much to itself. I also notice with the sound card separated from the video card by a few slots my noise floor is also quite a bit lower. I think now I may be able to put off the new sound card purchase for a while and pick up some other goodies I've been needing.

Many, many thanks again to everyone who helped me out, I'll continue to be a close watcher of this forum and hopefully I'll be able to return the favor and help someone else out. The other Cakewalk Forums out there are just pretenders, I posted on a few other sites and didn't get anything. HomeRecording.com is #1!!!
 
Glad to see someone so happy:D We like to please here, we are that kind of people.

I had a similar problem but it was due to my soundcard being too close to my AGP Video Card (they put out eons of e.m.f.;) )
 
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