Hey guys, I’m making a rare visit from The Cave back to the forum that originally brought me to HR. After a long drought I’ve been working on some audio files again. And I’ve been trouble shooting some rather bizarre computer behavior that recently started and I wanted to see if anyone else has ever experienced anything like this.
First, my setup – Athlon 64 3200 CPU, Abit KV-8 mobo with VIA K8T800 Pro chipset, 512 mb RAM. My audio card is an M-Audio Audiophile 2496. My software is…. well, it can be anything (I’ll explain below).
This system was last set up (clean installed) about 8 months ago and has been stable ever since, and I was working on audio successfully with it two months ago. Something happened to it over the last 60 days. The problem is this: when I make any sort of modification to an audio file – really ANY file, using ANY program – there are digital “artifacts” introduced into it. Random beeps and tones.
I first noticed this a week ago when I just wanted to burn an audio CD. I used a program called LAME (basically a front end for the Lame MP3 encoder) to convert some MP3 files into WAVs, and then burnt them to a CD. When playing back the CD later I could plainly hear “beeps” and random tones in it. At first I thought maybe the original MP3s were bad, but on playback they sounded fine. I then played back the converted .WAV files and sure enough some of them were full of beeps. I thought it must be a problem with the software – I re-converted the messed up files using Sound Forge, and this time they worked fine. Problem solved – or I thought.
Today I returned to a project I had been working on, making digital recordings of cassettes (live band recordings from years ago). The initial 24 bit recording in Sound Forge worked fine – no artifacts in the file. But then I try to use ANY plug-in to modify the file, and the converted file comes up filled with random beeps. I tried using two different versions of Sound Forge and a bunch of different plug-ins – such as volume leveling – and I get the same result. Certain plug-ins (like the “Wave Hammer”) seem to introduce more beeps than others, but any plug-in I have tried will cause some artifacts to appear.
I have done all the usual trouble shooting. I went to M-Audios site and checked their knowledge base. I didn’t find anything exactly like my situation. I downloaded and installed the latest M-Audio drivers (only 1 version newer than what I had) and the latest VIA chipset driver (likewise) with no change.
I’ve tried to think what I may have changed recently. I installed Sony Vegas video to do some video editing, and about 2 weeks ago I ran Registry Mechanic to do a registry clean-up. My next move is to restore the registry to a prior restore point, but I frankly doubt that will fix it. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a RAM module is going bad, but every non-audio application works fine. And the audio in all my games works fine as well. The CPU I am using is a general-purpose computer, I only use this system for 2 channel audio – no multi-track recording.
OK – now what I’d like to know, has anyone here encountered a problem similar to mine? And if so, how did you fix it? If I cant find a solution I’ll have to move my audio work to a different system, which would be a royal pain.
First, my setup – Athlon 64 3200 CPU, Abit KV-8 mobo with VIA K8T800 Pro chipset, 512 mb RAM. My audio card is an M-Audio Audiophile 2496. My software is…. well, it can be anything (I’ll explain below).
This system was last set up (clean installed) about 8 months ago and has been stable ever since, and I was working on audio successfully with it two months ago. Something happened to it over the last 60 days. The problem is this: when I make any sort of modification to an audio file – really ANY file, using ANY program – there are digital “artifacts” introduced into it. Random beeps and tones.
I first noticed this a week ago when I just wanted to burn an audio CD. I used a program called LAME (basically a front end for the Lame MP3 encoder) to convert some MP3 files into WAVs, and then burnt them to a CD. When playing back the CD later I could plainly hear “beeps” and random tones in it. At first I thought maybe the original MP3s were bad, but on playback they sounded fine. I then played back the converted .WAV files and sure enough some of them were full of beeps. I thought it must be a problem with the software – I re-converted the messed up files using Sound Forge, and this time they worked fine. Problem solved – or I thought.
Today I returned to a project I had been working on, making digital recordings of cassettes (live band recordings from years ago). The initial 24 bit recording in Sound Forge worked fine – no artifacts in the file. But then I try to use ANY plug-in to modify the file, and the converted file comes up filled with random beeps. I tried using two different versions of Sound Forge and a bunch of different plug-ins – such as volume leveling – and I get the same result. Certain plug-ins (like the “Wave Hammer”) seem to introduce more beeps than others, but any plug-in I have tried will cause some artifacts to appear.
I have done all the usual trouble shooting. I went to M-Audios site and checked their knowledge base. I didn’t find anything exactly like my situation. I downloaded and installed the latest M-Audio drivers (only 1 version newer than what I had) and the latest VIA chipset driver (likewise) with no change.
I’ve tried to think what I may have changed recently. I installed Sony Vegas video to do some video editing, and about 2 weeks ago I ran Registry Mechanic to do a registry clean-up. My next move is to restore the registry to a prior restore point, but I frankly doubt that will fix it. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a RAM module is going bad, but every non-audio application works fine. And the audio in all my games works fine as well. The CPU I am using is a general-purpose computer, I only use this system for 2 channel audio – no multi-track recording.
OK – now what I’d like to know, has anyone here encountered a problem similar to mine? And if so, how did you fix it? If I cant find a solution I’ll have to move my audio work to a different system, which would be a royal pain.