Why does my project distort so bad?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Delreek
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Delreek

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I am just doing voice work in AA. After about 5 minutes of recording my waveform distorts badly and the sound is unrecognizable. Anybody got any ideas why this happens?
 
Do you mean it doesn't distort right from the start? Or do you keep adding layers of vocals and eventually it starts to distort?
 
Delreek said:
I am just doing voice work in AA. After about 5 minutes of recording my waveform distorts badly and the sound is unrecognizable. Anybody got any ideas why this happens?

Hi.....u may just want to check your computer's recourses, ie. HD space?
Temp Directory location and buffer size? .......

Does your system still 'attempt' to record after 5 minutes? (albeit badly?)

Regards,
SSpit.
 
At first it is recording fine and then it just starts distorting badly. The wave forms are just solid and not the skinny waves at the beginning. It happens after about 4 or 5 minutes. I don't touch or change anything it just happens.

After 5 it happens it is still recording but in a distorted fashion. I can't lower the volume or anything to make it better it is just destroyed.

My rescources are all okay, plenty of hard drive space, memory etc..
 
"The wave forms are just solid and not the skinny waves at the beginning."

I had something like this a couple years ago. I'd record a track and it would be fine. I'd save it, and then the next time I opened the session, the visible waveform would be a solid block of noise, and the sound would be pure, screeching distortion. I lost a few tracks that way. Drove me nuts. Then I went into wave properties for those wavs and found out that Cool Edit had been saving those particular wavs as a different wav type, and for some reason when the session loaded, it converted those different wav types into shrieking noise. Anyway, what I did was to go through all of my sessions and make sure every track was saved as the same type of wav - in Edit View, click Save As>Options>your selection. In my case, I've decided to go with '32-bit Normalized Float (Type 3) - Default'. Hope this helps.

And the lesson I learned from this is that you have to *select* the wav type you want each track saved as, you can't trust Cool/Audition to do it automatically in a consistent or sensible way.
 
dobro,

The difference is mine happens while I am recording. At first it's fine and them I look at the wave form and it turns into a solid block.
 
Delreek said:
dobro,

The difference is mine happens while I am recording. At first it's fine and them I look at the wave form and it turns into a solid block.
Allow me to be captain obvious, but...

Have you deleted everything in your temp files folder? It sounds like you have a corrupt file in there.

Or, have you tried reinstalling the application?
 
Hey did you find an answer to this? I have started experienceing this problem. It hasnt happened before.

It will be recording fine....then it starts starts distorting all bad and sounding "roboty".

Ive tried to listen to a wav in edit view, and it does the same thing sporatically.

Any idea?

The audition theme plays well through just fine.
 
rockabilly said:
Hey did you find an answer to this? I have started experienceing this problem. It hasnt happened before.

It will be recording fine....then it starts starts distorting all bad and sounding "roboty".

Ive tried to listen to a wav in edit view, and it does the same thing sporatically.

Any idea?

The audition theme plays well through just fine.

What kind of soundcard are you using?

Do you see any clipping on the waveform in edit view? (large peaks/square waves at 0db)?

Or is the distortion only happening on playback?
 
Delreek,

I once had a preamp that got noticeably and increasingly noisier after it warmed up.

Just for the sake of eliminating that sort of possibility, I would start to diagnose the problem systematically. Some sound cards have the ability to monitor incoming signal before it gets to the recording software, or at least to meter it. Can you determine, using anything other than AA, if your signal strength increases while recording? Perhaps you could try recording using a different instrument, different hardware, or a different input. This would at least give evidence of where the problem may be occurring.

There is also the possibility of some sort of internal feedback loop between recording software and soundcard software.

Keep us posted.
RawDepth
 
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