Help - recording audio crackles

S

Stephen Jones

New member
Heya.
OK recording gurus, here is a puzzler for you. I am desperate...
I use Cakewalk 9.02 and a Delta 66 soundcard to record audio.
I haven't had any major problems recording before. So I'm in the middle of recoding a vocal track for a song and all of a sudden about one out of every 2 takes or so sounds like cracklin' oat bran. There are no problems with the other tracks on there so it's input only. The song is about 3 1/2 minutes with 5 other tracks at 16bit 44.1 Hz. I have a sample of what I'm talking about here:
http://home.nyc.rr.com/msss/ss/badaudio.wav
So far I've figured out it's not the mic or the mixer, it seems to be realted to the soundcard or something configured in the computer - maybe settings... There are no problems recording with the Turtle Beach soundcard that came with the computer. I've fiddled with the settings in the Delta system page and nothing seems to help.
The weird part is that it seems to occur only with a song with a few tracks going. Recording directly into Soundforage with the Delta is fine, and recording in Cakewalk in a new song with no other tracks is fine as well. I just got rid of some stuff on my hard drive to get to 42% free disk space, and this did not help. And there are no dropouts from overloaded resources - just crappy recorded audio.
Does anyone have any idea what this problem might be?
Mucho thanks from a desperate man,
steve
 
Sounds ugly.

I don't have a delta 66, but my Motu 2408mkII has a console were I can set the input buffer size. Since it is only happening with songs that have existing audio data, sounds like you are hitting some limit with your IO buffers. I don't think you will get dropout if your delta 66 buffer is not big enough. There is also the audio buffer in Cakewalk, but you would probably get dropout if that was the problem, dunno.

I would adjust both the Delta and Cakewalk for maximum latency and see if that fixes the problem. If so, then back off on the latency until itstarts up again. If that's not the issue I don't know what to tell you.

But I have one question. You said you have ruled out the mic and mixer. If you instead of recording voice, you record guitar, bypassing the mixer, do you get the crackling?

Nemal
 
Unfortunately it appears latency is not the issue. No changes have affected the crackling problem at all.
Also, I have bypassed the mixer and the problem is still there.
As well I've tried changing the slot of the Delta in order to give it a renewed IRQ preference position and resolve any conflicts - this didn't help either.
Could it be that something in the soundcard is physically broken?
Yuck.
 
When you hear the crackling, have you tried going to Otpions > Audio and in the General Tab hit the Wave Profiler button?

I've had some audio problems...bad one's...that were fixed by doing that...it seems to reset the audio drivers. I can't think of
much else to tell you.

Good Luck,

Nemal
 
I tried the Wave Pofiler - no help. But thank you anyway.
Interestingly enough, I just tried recording with 5 wav tracks going in Cool Edit Pro and 10 out of 10 times there was no problem. In Cakewalk using the same tracks there was that buzz again on the second take, so it looks like the problem is definitely in Cakewalk. Can anyone please offer me any advice as to what could be the problem here?
Thanks,
steve
 
I had a problem with Cakewalk when I got my Delta 66. I used it with a soundblaster for ever with no problems. When I switched to the Delta, the whole thing went banana-wacky. It was like the guys from Rice Crispys moved into my computer with all the snaps, crackles, and pops. I Have Windows ME on my computer, and the Delta software didn't come with a driver for that(I don't think). Anyway, I went tried everything EXCEPT downloading the Windows ME driver for the Delta from their site, and nothing. Finally I went to the Delta site and found the driver for ME (wich I think they had problems with initially), downloaded and installed it, and now I have no problems, with the exception of human error:D . Check it out. Hope it helps. Tom.
 
Looks like the problem was with the latest Delta driver. On a whim I installed the original driver that came with the card and it's working OK so far.
I have no idea why that new driver would cause a problem in CW and not in Cool Edit Pro, but there you go...
Thanks everyone for your help,
steve
 
Hi there, I've experienced the same thing and I noticed that it does it when I get muti tracks going. even though you may be recording one track at a time, the other tracks get read unless you archive them. Select the other tracks that you aren't going to record on, and select the archive option. That will free up the system to work on just one track. It's worked for me, hopefully it will work for you....
*bird*
 
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