problem with clickinbg and popping!

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drummersteve

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hi there
i posted a message on mp3 clinic n they directed me here. basically, its quite weird...
having recorded 8 drum tracks and 1 bass track, no clicks and pops. recorded stereo piano, 2 tracks, then vocals over the top, clicks and pops like hell! i just this week bought a new hard drive dedicated for audio, seagate barracuda SATA, i bought it to get rid of this problem! i originally thought the reason 4the clicking and popping was because of excessive tracks building up, but why wud recordings not click with 9 tracks, but do with only 3?! it makes no sense to me.
i wondered if it would be the poor mic i used for the vocals, some stagg mic, nothing special, but the last person i asked said itd be PC issues. my specs r good tho...

2.4gig

1GB ram

80GB maxtor HD for software/OS

120GB seagate HD for audio

WinFastA340 TD nVIDIA GeForce FX5200 256 MB DDR 128Bit AGP card (just read that all off the box!) i use two monitors with this card.

m-audio delta 1010lt with the most updated asio drivers

cubase sx 1.0

i think thats all u need to know, im lost as to why its doing what it is. i know its a rather long winded post n uve probably heard this loads of times, but ive read as many threads n none of them seem to solve my problem! any feedback would be greatley appreciated. thanks alot!

Steve
 
With that spec it shouldn't click and pop with 59 tracks, never mind 9, or 3. It was me who directed you over to this forum where hopefully you'll get better help than I can give, but...

(I'm assuming you are running a legit version of Cubase)

- Have you checked the meters on the mixer's master output? You're not just recording too hot and getting digital distortion?

- If you put a regular CD in your PC's CD player, does it play OK?

- Have you pressed the F12 key during playback to see if your CPU or Disc access is being overtaxed (something badly wrong if they are)

- Go into device manager from the control panel and check your hard drive properties - make sure they are set on DMA and not PIO

- Are you running an AMD processor? I had such problems with an M-Audio card and a Via chipset mobo that depsite much effort from folk here to help I ended up giving up and getting an EMU card.

I hope you'll get some better help here - you've got a well spec'd set up and it's frustrating as hell when this shit happens.
 
haha yeh it is very VERY fustrating,specially as i bought a new hard drive to fix this problem.

the meters are in the high green/low yellow kinda area. there not clipping on input, i made sure of that. the output may have been clipping whilst i was recording the vocals (the piano part) so we could get it loud enough in the headphones,but i cant imagine it is this causing the problem...

CD's, as far as i know, play fine. i had a CD in the cd drive at the time but it wasnt active so i doubt it was that.

il check the F12 thing, im at college at the moment haha.

il check the hard drive thing too, i take it u mean the device manager in windows, and not in cubase?(if there is one in cubase,ive never seen it).

Its a pentium 4 processor, not AMD. yeh, pentium 4 2.4gHz. could it be something to do with the settings i have for my soundcard? i cant remember what the buffer size is set too, but could it be something to do with that? im run out of ideas and any glimmer of light right nowwould be awesome. thanks, btw garry, 4 responding to my threads twice! much appreciated :D

Steve

PS is there anywhere within the computer where you can set the processor to prioritise certain tasks? like an interrupt does, takes priority over whatever else is being processed (as far as i know?) so i could set it to byas the soundcard to ensure maximum quality? thanks!
 
I run a pentium 3.0ghz 512 ram
I back off the latency a little, its now at 5ms sometimes I have to go to 7ms, and it s clean. What sample rate are you recording at.

I dont have solid answers, but I am interested on how you solve this.
 
hi there,

ive tried 44100Hz, upto 96000Hz. different bit rates, 16, 24, 32 float. it always seems to be crackly tho. its odd, when the drums are recorded there is zero. but i record something like vocals with only 2 previos tracks and clicks like hell. im lost for ideas now!!!! any help would be great.
 
Is it possible that you are getting clicks and pops on your drums but you are not hearing them because of the high SPLs of the drums? Its easy to hear ANY flaws in a vocal track.

The first place I would start is with my buffers, then levels. I would wonder about my cables too, if they were low quality. I use to use cheap cable until I realized that you could HEAR noise in the signal from the cable when you moved them!

good luck.
 
You might have services running in the background that are bogging down the computer. This is especially true with windows XP as they added a bunch of crap that you need to shut off. Black viper's site tells you what to turn off.http://www.blackviper.com/
You also may want to try TuneUp Utilities. It is a very good software that will optimize your computer and it will run much better.http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3891.html
 
I dont know if cubase supports it, but I was having a lot of pops and clicks (cpu stutters) until I switched to ASIO drivers. After that it rarely happens.
Hope that helps.

Amra
 
im already using the m-audio ASIO drivers.
possibly the clicks are inaudible because of the high SPL, but ive since recorded bass over the top and surely the clicks owuld be audible as it is a much lower SPL?! :confused: ive read that VIA chipsets on mobos are known for not being very compatiable with the delta range of soundcard. my mobo has a VIA chipset,would this be the problem?
 
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