Digital Clicking and Popping While Recording

[madguitar1086]

I am in desperate need of help. I record from home with a few microphones, a Tascam US16x08 usb interface, Studio One 2 Artist DAW, and a brand new Dell Inspiron 17 7000 laptop. This seems to be a pretty simple setup. I bought the new Dell because my old Dell (about 6 years old) was not cutting it in the audio recording department. I was experiencing digital clicking and popping noises every few minutes, and these noises would, more often than not, leave artifacts in my recorded takes. I noticed that this issue would occur when my CPU monitor would show CPU spikes. My brand new Dell is proving to be almost as bad as my old one. You would think that a brand new computer could handle software and hardware that is several years old.

I studied up on what the problem might be, but have not found any solid solutions. I have optimized my power settings (high performance), I have disabled my wi-fi and Bluetooth (the new Dell is only being used for recording), I disabled my antivirus software, and I have cut down on needless background processes. This had done nothing to remedy the problem. I have tried changing the buffer size: at the lowest setting, the problem occurs constantly, and at the highest setting it occurs less often, but still occurs.

I read about CPU throttling, but have found no way to disable it in Windows 8.

I am in desperate need to help. Any advice would be most appreciated.

Sincerely,
Desperate Home Recording Musician
Madguitar1086

 

[Robus]

Hard to say without knowing more, and perhaps hearing it. Are you running a lot of plugins? Some plugins like reverb are CPU hogs. If you're using a lot of reverb and haven't tried this, put a single instance of the reverb on it's own track and send everything that needs reverb to that track. It's more efficient than running multiple reverb plugins at once (sounds better too, IMO).

You might also try rendering any tracks that are using a lot of plugins, especially CPU intensive ones or ones that fire samples. I do this with my drum tracks (I'm using EZDrummer) and any track that uses Melodyne.

I take it you've updated all your drivers.

 

[miroslav]

I dunno...I've been using Dell computers for the last 15+ years...never had those issues. but of course, it depends on what model. All I ever use are the Precision class models. Right now running a Precision T3400, 16GB RAM, 3.0 GHz Extreme Quad Core processor.

If that problem is following you from computer to computer...it may the interface, the drivers or some ASIO buffer thing...etc...etc.

Also...are you getting CPU spikes during initial tracking (which would be odd) or is this after you've recorded, and you are then applying lots of plug-ins (more likely)...?

 

[Robus]

If the spikes are happening during tracking, then I'm guessing the OP is overdubbing against a song that already has a lot of plugins running. That happens to me on occasion. In that case I'll mute or freeze the tracks I don't need to hear while I overdub.

 

[miroslav]

If the spikes are happening during tracking, then I'm guessing the OP is overdubbing against a song that already has a lot of plugins running.

Yes...that's the other possibility too.

Straight tracking would have little effect on the CPU, since it's more about the HD transfer speeds and number of simultaneous tracks.
CPU spike issues often point to plug-ins use. Some plugs are "light" and you can stack a bunch...while just one CPU-heavy plug can bring it to its knees. RAM plays into is well, AFA real-time processing support...but you take some some reverbs for instance, and it's a big CPU drain. Run that on a bunch of tracks...and you're going to bottom out for sure.