re: ambient clicks and pops

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Richard1949

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My DAW is PreSonus Artist 5 on an HP system with 32 GB RAM. What is/are the causes for ambient clicks and pops in a track? For discussion purposes, you can discount clipping or programs in the background that traditionally cause issues, like Norton. The clicks/pops are not that frequent (thank god) and there seems to be no relationship to signal gain level or type of input signal (analog or digital) or whether it's a virtual instrument. Anyone??
 
Are the clicks and pops part of the recording or just heard intermittently during playback?

Stating the obvious, perhaps, but if they're recorded you'd be able to reliably hear them at exactly the same point in the project repeatedly,
whereas if they're not recorded down they would be at different times and unpredictable.
 
Sorry Richard, I didn't realise this was your first post.
Welcome to the forums!
 
Yes and no. Sometimes, the clicks are obviously part of the recording, and at other times, I might hear one, back up to hear it again, and it isn't there. I know there's got to be a cause; I just don't know what it is. And I've gone round and round with PreSonus support people. They obviously know their system, but getting them to admit to bugs is almost impossible. And thank you for the greeting. I'm using good cords, so we can eliminate that, too. I suspect that it is some kind of flaw in PreSonus' program. I've used this same recording program on two different PC systems, over time, so it isn't the computer per se.

FWIW, I positively identified a different program bug a couple months ago. It was related to adding their reverb plug-in. Often, if I just went to add it, I'd get the little circle of doom and the program would crash. BUT if I already had any existing reverb plug-in running, if I just clicked and dragged the effect over to the new channel, I did not experience a crash. And I repeated this experiment enough times to call it legit.
 
Yeah, hi Richard and welcome. First thing, increase your buffer size 1024 or bigger. No problems with latency for playback.

If the clicks are 'baked in' you have some tedious work ahead! There are De-clicking softwares, I know of Soundforge and you can get a free months use of that from MAGIX.

Dave.
 
Richard1949 said:
My DAW is PreSonus Artist 5 on an HP system with 32 GB RAM. What is/are the causes for ambient clicks and pops in a track? For discussion purposes, you can discount clipping or programs in the background that traditionally cause issues, like Norton. The clicks/pops are not that frequent (thank god) and there seems to be no relationship to signal gain level or type of input signal (analog or digital) or whether it's a virtual instrument. Anyone??
Click to expand...
Probably the buffer size that is causing it - The Norton thing is well known - I hope you took it off.
 
Oh, and during recording I consistently use a block size of 128, then switch to 2048 for review/edit. And I don't use a lot of "virtual instruments," And with my 32GB RAM, the load on the CPU at any point is very low. I'm not taxing it. On that topic, I was very disappointed when I purchased a certain virtual Hammond Organ, only to find that it put a HUGE load on my CPU, to where I basically don't use it, because of the signal drop-out it causes. My other virtual keyboard - Lounge Lizard EP - puts nowhere near the load on the unit as the Hammond one and I don't recall ever having a signal drop-out with it.
 
Using a block size of 1024 creates significant latency.
 
Richard1949 said:
Oh, and during recording I consistently use a block size of 128, then switch to 2048 for review/edit. And I don't use a lot of "virtual instruments," And with my 32GB RAM, the load on the CPU at any point is very low. I'm not taxing it. On that topic, I was very disappointed when I purchased a certain virtual Hammond Organ, only to find that it put a HUGE load on my CPU, to where I basically don't use it, because of the signal drop-out it causes. My other virtual keyboard - Lounge Lizard EP - puts nowhere near the load on the unit as the Hammond one and I don't recall ever having a signal drop-out with it.
Click to expand...
Not sure your software, but you can keep everything basic so you can record, output the MIDI to another "stereo track and record to analog and then turn off the VSTi. Or if your software allows it, you can freeze the track, which does the same thing.
 
On the VSTi that is causing problem. You can record the MIDI and get the parts done and then either render it to another channel as a wave file so that you can have the instrument part and turn off the VSTi so you can continue to record. Or many DAWs have a freeze track option which renders the parts in WAVE and turns off the VSTi so that it doesn't tax your system.
 
Something is adrift. In the last 20 years of using cubase on all sorts of PCS and Macs I have never adjusted the buffer sizes, ever! Whatever the default is on all the interfaces I have had, is what it works at - VSTi (and I use lots) do not cause any grief at all. In fact, my only occasional issue is where a few sample libraries are on an external drive formatted (because I move it around) in exFat. This seems to cause a bottleneck if too many notes and sounds are playing at the same time. DM60 mentioned the freeze function and that is what I do to solve my external drive issue. The NAS and other drives, internal and external are trouble free. In fairness - Spitfire made it very clear the drive is for delivery, NOT actual use, but it works well enough.

If your performance checks reveal things are ticking over, you need to find out what process running is killing the system.
 
Thanks for trying to help me, really. But you'd have to explain all that step-by-step. I'm familiar with most of the basic workings of PreSonus, but I have no idea what buttons to push, where regarding the VST suggestion. But let's get back to the ambient clicks I hear. What are some basic answers?
 
Rob, you have just been incredibly lucky! Just a couple of days ago I tried to play something my son had sent me on a W7 laptop nia my MOTU M4 and it was stuttering. I check the M4 settings and somehow it had dropped to 64 samples which is too much load for its i3 processor. Whacked it up to 512, smooth as yer baby's whatsit!

I would also like to say that the interface and definitely its drivers are perhaps at least AS important to securing click free, low latency rendering.

Dave.
 
Could we return to my original question? What are possible causes of these "clicks" I'm experiencing? Also, out of all the participants at this forum, are there any other PreSonus users?
 
Richard1949 said:
Could we return to my original question? What are possible causes of these "clicks" I'm experiencing? Also, out of all the participants at this forum, are there any other PreSonus users?
Click to expand...
We do need to know if they are permanent, i.e. recorded and if so then you could perhaps post a 10 second sample?

If they are just random noises it becomes far more difficult. Could be a bad connection, computer glitch. Even a fridge thermostat!

Dave.
 
Richard1949 said:
Could we return to my original question? What are possible causes of these "clicks" I'm experiencing? Also, out of all the participants at this forum, are there any other PreSonus users?
Click to expand...
First, when you render your song and play it in a media player, do you still have clicks? If you don't, then we know it is the DAW and performance based. If you do, then I think it is hardware related (clicks are getting recorded probably through the interface). If you can do that test and tell us the result or post the result, maybe we can "help" your situation.

Also, what interface are you using? I didn't see that mentioned anywhere.

You also stated 1024 created too much latency, but did it remove the clicks? If it did, then your CPU is being over taxed. That goes back to freezing tracks when you are recording so you can lower your latency and kick it back up for play back and mixing. The only time latency is a problem is when you are doing live recording.
 
Clicks that do not show up in the bounced mix are almost always resource related, e.g., bus/disk speed or congestion/contention.

Start by freezing all the tracks or just confirming it doesn’t show up in the mix when bounced/rendered, and check to make sure your levels are are all below 0dBFS while you are at it.

If the clicks go away, then you have some optimization to work out to solve the resource issue. It is rarely memory, except the buffer size tinkering can help, but most modern systems should work with the defaults. Another things to try are to move your projects to a fast SSD on a fast bus, ideally separate from the interface. If that fails, freeze tracks you are not actively editing/recording.

Good luck.
 
OK. If you would be so kind... 1. What do you mean by "freeze all tracks?" 2. What is 0dBFS? 3. What is a fast SSD on a fast bus? 4. Separate from the interface? I'm in totally uncharted territory at this point. I've been recording for quite some time; I'm just not familiar with the terms you are using. Sorry about that. My interface is an Audiobox USB 96.
 
Richard1949 said:
OK. If you would be so kind... 1. What do you mean by "freeze all tracks?" 2. What is 0dBFS? 3. What is a fast SSD on a fast bus? 4. Separate from the interface? I'm in totally uncharted territory at this point. I've been recording for quite some time; I'm just not familiar with the terms you are using. Sorry about that. My interface is an Audiobox USB 96.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm not familiar at all with your DAW, but "freeze" in Logic means to essentially "bounce-in-place" a track, or tracks, but the bounced track doesn't really show up in the DAW. Then, when you are, for instance, recording a new track, or working on some other tracks, the frozen track is simply being played as an audio track, with all FX, automation, etc. printed into the track you are hearing, and you cannot make changes to the frozen track(s) without un-freezing them. In that way, it can free up CPU and disk resources. I tried to find a manual for your DAW but am a little unclear on the terminology used there - one doc I found allowed tracks to be "transformed" to an audio track, with an option to revert back to the original, which sounds similar. You can always "bounce in place" in a project, but you might have trouble going back on that activity, so when I do that, I do that in a [Logic] "Alternative"

0.0 dBFS is just the digital, "Full Scale," max decibel level your tracks or mix must stay below to prevent clipping. That's something you are probably doing already, but sometimes the individual tracks might go above that, and it's something to be aware of (as I noticed in a recent mix here I was fooling around with) because you may not know what or how individual FX actually process that digital content. Yes, many DAWs are fully 32-bit float these days, but I am sure I don't know whether my 3rd party stuff is or not.

A solid-state-drive/disk (SSD) on an external, e.g. USB, bus with your audio/DAW project files means that you will not have contention with your computer's system drive, which may be busy doing a lot of reads of your application, or fetching virtual instrument files, whatever, while you are trying to write new tracks and read existing tracks out of the project files at the same time. If you have a block diagram or insight into how your PC is internally configured, it may have more than one internal USB hub, and I prefer keeping the project files and interface separate, though if you don't have anything else on that bus, it may not be a problem. Just don't have your backup disk on the same hub and running that at the same time.

If you've been recording for some time then you probably have done many optimizations around anti-virus software and temporarily disabling things like backup or even WiFi, but I've found that putting the projects on a separate, external drive helps, though you want to have relatively newer SSds because the write speed can be slow on older ones.

And not loading up reverb FX on individual tracks by using an aux for that with sends is another optimization that you may already be using.

Sorry for the "book" and hope this doesn't just add confusion. I have trouble being succinct :)
 
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