what the heck went wrong again?

[six]

hi there

some months ago my full duplex recordings started to have a crackling hisses here and there. then "here and there" became "every other second".

that was when I still worked with my 750 amd, 128mb ram, n-track 2.2, win98se, sb live! value.

i checked every cable - no improvement. i replaced the soundcard (sb live! 5.1) - nothing changed.

then i thought it had something to do with cpu-overheating, lack of electric power or bad RAM... the whole machine was a bit over-aged anyway, so I changed to a AMD 2500 XP, 256 ram, lots of electric power and cooling. still win98se and still n-track 2.2.

brand new machine (2 and a half weeks old now) and everything worked fine (some test-recordings and yesterday quite a bit of a whole song)... until today. the same distorted hiss even when I just playback. 4 mono tracks, one stereo.

i thought about what was the difference between my today-system and my yesterday-system: some divX video-decoding plug-ins. i removed them, i even removed the whole win media-player 9. still hisses. DAMNED!!!


pleeeeeeeeeez, help me.

 

[badassmak]

Have you tried altering the buffer settings?

It doesn't sound like a huge load on your system but I would try that first. Some codecs are not so easy to simply 'remove' either .

 

[Cazzbar]

I had a similar annoying hiss, I traced mine back to my Direct Pro soundcard. It has 4 inputs and I noticed channels 3 & 4 in the manager program were dancing slightly even with nothing plugged in. Disabling these channels stopped all hiss and my sanity returned. Luckily I only record one stereo track at a time using channels 1 & 2.

I guess muting all your channels one by one would be an idea, starting with your soundcard inputs, then all the channels on your mixer etc...

I know I get horrible sound break-up in N-track if I play back with the in-built metronome switched on. That was a tricky one to track down until I realised the break-up was keeping better time than me!

 

[six]

thanks for the answers so far. i will try some of the stuff you mentioned... although I think it shouldn't be the buffer-settings because they're still the same as they were before the problem appeared.

i'd almost bet it's this f***ing divX codec, but I don't really get rid of it.


cheers mates

six

keep on posting

 

[six]

i got VERY rid of all the divX-stuff: no change (as if I didn't expect this!)

i thought the fact that the files could be stored too far apart from each other on the drive might be the problem - but then I guess the hd-activity would have to be higher; i mean there's only a bit of reading-noise coming from my hd every 2 seconds or so.

 

[badassmak]

Nobody has been here in awhile eh???


Have you made sure all your drivers are updated? I had a problem once with hissing and cracking, when I updated the drivers on my onboard sound. I had to actually roll the driver back to fix the problem. (only available on win XP tho).

Are you sure you aren't recording extra blank tracks, giving you hiss?

Maybe not enough RAM? Does this problem happen with only two tracks recorded?

Have you tried posting this question at the n-track site?

 

[badassmak]

I also kinda doubt it is your harddrive. I have never heard of a harddrive causing this sortof problem.

 

[fritzmusic]

Ive ran into a similar issue just recently and after pulling my hair out and uninstalling everything from DirectX to N-track and plugins, found out that it was stealth spyware running from my c:\program files\ folder that ad-aware and spybot S&D didn't pick up. Never underestimate the capability of spyware to screw up your day. Try going through your c:\program files folders one by one if you have to and determin which software you explicitly installed in your system. Most spybot folders have cryptic looking files in them without any supporting .exe programs. Definitely worth checking into if I must say....