Terrible audio problems with Windows 7 laptop + Audiobox USB + Studio One Artist

K

kruiseri

New member
Hi all!

I just bought Presonus Audiobox USB and also a new laptop (Samsung RF610 with Windows 7 64bit).
I'm completely new with PC recording systems, used before Roland VS-840ex 8-track recorder.
So I have installed 64bit Audiobox USB driver and 32bit Studio One Artist (latest version ; 32bit version should work ok with 64bit OS, right?). Default settings in use.

Yesterday I started to use Studio One Artist for the first time and immediately had several big noise/crackling issues.
I would be very much appreciated, if someone could give me any hint what to do!

I plugged my guitar to Audiobox input one. Audio box out is connected to Behringer B2030A TRUTH -monitors.
When I play guitar through audiobox, audio is ok without using Studio one and if the laptop power cord is not connected (->laptop battery is used).

But as I started to use Studio One and made a track for guitar, the problems started
- I inserted Ampire guitar effects to be used with guitar with the track. No recording yet started. Just played using Ampire, like getting a distorted sound.
-> cracklings ('snaps') are heard every now and then (couple of times in a minute)
-> after playing for some time, audio starts to come seconds later out from the monitors than I'm actually playing. It's like a 3 second delay I would be using!
-> also if I connect a power cord to the laptop, then I'll get a HUGE distorted noise from the monitors all the time. It stops immediately when I unplug the power cord. So am I stuck with recording only using the laptop's own battery which will limit the time for only ~two hours?

Please give me any hints what to check and where to start to get things better!
 
Audiobox

Hey Man,
Hope I can help as I had the Presonus Audiobox as well for about 2 months. I bought it about a year ago and it was my first audio interface and I was just getting into home recording. I like you set up Studio Artist One daw as it came free. Installed it on my Dell laptop with Windows 7 and had the same cracking noise issues and was pissed and like, WTF!? this piece of crap is unusable. After doing a month of internet research I sold it for about $75 and took my losses and immediately bought the Presonus Firestudio Mobile. It is waaaayyyyy I mean waaaaaayyy better in sound quality, build, etc. goes up to 96khz and has no cracking issues.

However, with that said, I still with the Mobile cannot use the Ampire guitar plugin in my Studio One DAW. I have upgraded to the Pro version of Studio One, have perfect wires and setup but still have some cracking issues when trying to use that or Guitar Rig 3. Now the delay you are experiencing is known in recording world as latency. Research it for more details, but short and sweet, your computer is probably not powerful enough to handle the complex calculations etc. when using a guitar emulator plug in. My Dell Latitude laptop with 4GB of ram and dual core only 1 1/2 years old has issues so that kinda tells us I think we need more powerful computers and more specifically, computers that have been set up and optimized for home music recording in order to really use the guitar emulator plug ins. This is funny, because I have no issues using anything else such as my Studio One Artist Pro plug in compressors, reverbs, delays, or my midi Oxygen 61 keyboard controller. Just those fucking guitar amp plugin simulators!

There are things you can do by yourself to optimize your new laptop. Sniff around the Presonus Support website and you'll find they have a great optimization guide that guides you thru specific steps to give your laptop more recording processing power. I haven't done all of them as its my work computer and I don't want to screw things up. But, for starters try going to devices and temporarily disabling your internal network wireless card. These are notorious for causing issues when tracking and can cause cracking etc. You can also go to 'Computer' right click advance settings and switch power from 'best appearance' to 'best performance'. That'll give you some more juice to work with. You should definetly install the max amount of RAM your computer can hold as well, if you haven't done that already. That will be a big boost of power.

Not so sure about your power supply issue with your monitors, that sucks big time. Try getting a Furman M8-x2 power conditioner only $56, as I did, and plug your computer into that baby and see if it solves your issue, or move your desk around to different areas of the room. Perhaps there's some interference issues going on with lights or other electrical gear, even your guitar could be the culprit.

Bottom line, you're probably azz out on using Ampire and you should dump that piece of shite Audiobox ASAP and upgrade to the Mobile. Trust me you'll be way happier. I know it sucks cause you are going thru the very newb learning process as I did, and it's horrible cause you buy stuff and then realize you shoulda saved up a bit more and gotten the better unit. At least you didn't do what I did at first and buy Cakewalk Guitar Tracks Pro 4 USB for $150, realized I wanted better, bought the Audiobox for $150 and finally realized the Mobile for $300 was the ticket and would serve my solo guitarist/singer needs for at least 2-3 years before perhaps upgrading. Yeah, I fucked myself good. didn't I!

It's a learning process though and again these forums are the best for learning what not to buy and do. For me, I either mic my amp or go direct in with my Tech 21 sans amp pedals which works killer. Yeah, I know I'm bummed too I can't use the Ampire but its a fucking headache trying to get it to work with no cracking. I at least don't have the latency issues you are having. Good luck man and trust me, if you keep at it and get that Mobile unit, spend a year researching these forums to death and recording with your poor mans rig like me, with plenty of reading up on recording techniques, you'll be stoked and well on your way to making nice recordings.

You may want to consider buying the 'Killer Home Recording' series by Brandon Drury for $100 for his silver package you get a shitload of valuable and easy to understand knowledge that will boost your learning curve. I got this last month and its pretty great stuff answering alot of my questions and giving me guidance and making me feel better about my poor man's studio. BTW I did get a fully modded ZenPro Golden Age Pre 73 for X-Mas. Research that if you want. That into my Mobile with my brand new Rode NTK mic I got for X-Mas as well is really starting to improve my overall quality. But you don't need anything other than the Mobile and a Shure SM57 or MXL V63M like I had for my first year to make some decent recordings.

Anyway, to make a long story even longer, in about a year or so, if you have taken a similar approach as I have and suggest here, you'll be like, wow! I actually know quite a bit about home recording, gear, technique etc. Don't get me wrong though as I've only still scratched the surface. This past year has been one of the funniest of my life learning this new home recording thang. Much more to learn, but you gotta at least have a half decent interface when starting out or you'll just get discouraged and end up throwing it against the wall. I almost drop kicked the Audiobox a couple times. If you wanna hear my Mobile in action check out my songs on Myspace wyattscottpunk . BTW, the first 4 songs on my site were recorded with just the Mobile interface and a MXL V63M, MXL 990/991 and Shure SM57. Good luck Brutha!
 
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Hi,

and thanks for the thorough advice man! I've tried changing ASIO settings from studio one and also tweaked Windows 7 (disabled some "nice" graphics) to boost the performance a bit. Unfortunately these did not help. Latency may be ok at first, but it strangely changes to very bad by itself. As I said before, it becomes 2-3 second!

Don't know if I have to return my Audiobox, if this doesn't get solved. And what is the worst thing is that my new laptop does not have firewire port. So I don't know what else options do I have except these USB interfaces... :(
 
Headaches are part of this game called home recording

All is not lost my friend! Just keep studying up. Check out Tweaks Guide to Home Recording on the internet. Tons of such great information on every aspect of home recording and if you read enough of it you'll figure out a 'best' course of action for your situation. But again my strong recommendation is to sell the audiobox, it's just not good enough sound quality wise and has issues we know about. If you want to be even half serious with this home recording thing I'd off it and save up for a $300 unit. That's the starting point really I feel for an adequate interface with decent preamps and converters and bells and whistles. If you are only able to use USB don't fret too much as there's a ton of great USB interfaces and while USB 2.0 is not as fast as firewire many people use it with no issues whatso ever. This from Brandon Drury on Recording Review "USB 2.0 is a much faster version of USB 1.1 even though the ports seem identical. USB 2.0 is capable of recording high track counts at the same time. A USB 2.0 device will not even blink when recording 8 tracks simultaneously. The latency is much faster with USB 2.0 than with USB 1.1". You may want to research USB interfaces. The M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB Audio Interface is a good one to start with. Just keep researching like I keep saying. You'll figure it out!
 
Hope is not gone yet with Audiobox! Yesterday I hazzled and tweaked Win7 more with all kinds of things I found from Presonus (and other) forums.
And voila' - when I then started Studio One and tried the same guitar recording as before, it all worked just fine! I cannot tell how damn good feeling it was!
So now I'm going to study more and find out the setup I have to made so that it works every time. But anyway this was a clear progress and I'm not throwing Audiobox to garbage bin yet!
 
Awesome!

So glad to hear you figured it out! That's great news! I could probably use that info too. What did you find? Did you use the optimization guide on Presonus? I've read that and done some of it but I still can't use the Ampire without some cracking and noise. I guess the Audiobox may work out to be the ticket for you! Nice!
 
Yeah, I did all kinds of optimizations. Disabled many unnecessary graphical "enhancements" from Win7, removed all unnecessary programs from Windows startup, closed unnecessary processes&programs from background, disabled WLAN & bluetooth and optimized power settings for Studio One & Windows 7 according to Presonus instructions (there's a zip-package audio-power-settings.zip)

Now that was the first part, then I'm gonna go for the power-noise thing. With the latency investigation I just used headphones (no monitors connected).

I've already made my first song experiments with Studio one with couple of guitar tracks, drums, bass and synth. ;)
 
You need to monitor with headphones in the Presonus (and most interfaces) - that's what they call it zero - latency monitoring.
The laptop powers upply noise is standard - I had the same issue for years now. I record until my battery dies then I stop and recharge.
Turning off the INTERNET is crucial otherwise you get a lot of noise and dropouts.
 
Actually I've progressed quite a bit also in monitor side. Just bought balanced cable (between USB audiobox and monitors) to test its effect on the noise and there is now much much less power supply noise, almost none! So I'm gonna buy another cable too and thus will be use also monitors, in addition to the headphones.

And yes, turning of internet (WLAN and BT radios) was the first thing I did.

So it seems that there's still hope with this USB interface recording... :)
 
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