trouble with mix down using Cubase

  • Thread starter Thread starter sdeyoung
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sdeyoung

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I'm having trouble with my mixdowns being noisy.. When played in Cubase they sound great, play it once it has been mix to a stereo wav file and it's noisy, little bit of crackling also.. Play a store bought CD and it sounds fine so I know it's not my sound card or power amp or monitors.

I have a set of event 20/20 monitors with a Roland SRA-50 power amp.

I'm a doing something wrong when I export? I believe i'm recording at 16bits, want to go up to 24. How can I change that?
 
How many hard drives do you have?
What kind of soundcard do you have?
Do you have your DMA checked for your recording hard drive?
Computer spec's

With this information maybe we can help you out!
 
Also, make sure that your levels are such that you are not clipping the master bus. That will cause distortion on your mixdown.

There should be an options menu where you can setup your recording configuration and select 24 bits.
 
I have two hard drives but I'm using my primary for recording(80 gig drive). Using a Firepod. PIII 866MHZ, 768megs ram.. The problem isn't recording the tracks though, it's when I export to a final mixdown wav file, and no i'm not clipping any channels including my output.. My track all sound nice and clean when I'm playing them in Cubase. You think the DMA thing would affect the exporting process?
 
sdeyoung said:
I have two hard drives but I'm using my primary for recording(80 gig drive). Using a Firepod. PIII 866MHZ, 768megs ram.. The problem isn't recording the tracks though, it's when I export to a final mixdown wav file, and no i'm not clipping any channels including my output.. My track all sound nice and clean when I'm playing them in Cubase. You think the DMA thing would affect the exporting process?
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When you say that you are using your primary as your recording drive do you mean the same drive that your software is on? that is not good, I mean you can do this but it is better to use a different hard drive for your audio and yes the DMA can cause your audio to crackle....... :D
 
yeah, I'm using my primary drive for recording, same drive that Cubase and winxp is on.. It was never a problem in the past.. That's how we recording our first album and it sounds great.. So even though my tracks don't sound noisy when playing them back, if I don't have DMA enabled on my drive it can cause the exporting into a stereo wav file sound noisy? hmmm, maybe i'll check to see if it's enabled when I get home.. I think by default Windows doesn't enable DMA, at least I remember that from the Win98 days, not to sure about XP..
 
You are correct, by default it is not checked, and you know the longer you run windows you get a bunch of junk on your drive that can make it run funny, If I were you I would start using your second hard drive for audio, and check and see if the DMA is enabled, that should help you out..... ;)
 
o.k another quick question, this may be why i'm having this problem also.. I just noticed that I created my project (just test drum tracks) in 16bit (which i wanted to do in 24) and it's set to broadcast wav file. Should it not be set to just .wav? Anyone know what the difference is?
 
ok, weird.. I just figured out, it's not my mixdown audio wav files that are crap, it's my cheap ass ISA sound card that i'm using.. son of a.. Once i selected my firepod as the default winxp sound card, played back my wav's in winamp, they were clean as a whistle.. but it's weird cuz my mp3's don't sound shity through that crappy sound card. oh well, i think i'm just gonna start using the firepod as my main sound card from now on.. There shouldn't be any harm to the firepod right?
 
I dont see any problems on doing that, that is what a sound card is for! ;)
 
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