Peaking white noise during a recording

[Tyler Horton]

Hello. Last night, I tried recording a multi-track project and everything ran smoothly during the recording itself. I'm listening back before I start editing, and one of the tracks has a 20-minute window where there is peaking white noise at regular intervals.

Context:

I'm using a Focusrite 18i8 with 4 XLR mics plugged in. (Inputs 1 and 2 are condenser mics using phantom power, 3 & 4 are dynamic mics). All recordings from this session using this interface are perfectly fine except for the track recorded with input #1. This 20-minute period is the only time it happens and only on this track.

There are no plug-ins on any of the tracks during recording. The entire recording session was about about 4 hours in total, and this happens around 1hr 26 minutes in and lasts until about 1hr 50min.

Here is a youtube link to a small 1 minute section of the issue occurring (warning, this is loud) : 

 

 

[Lord Tim]

That's usually indicative that one or more of your plugins have gone into demo mode. If you were running any plugins, I'd look there first.

But since you say you're not... possibly some kind of disk corruption? Is this just during playback of the project or does it do this when it's exported to a mixdown too?

Edited December 18, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Tyler Horton]

10 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

That's usually indicative that one or more of your plugins have gone into demo mode. If you were running any plugins, I'd look there first.

But since you say you're not... possibly some kind of disk corruption? Is this just during playback of the project or does it do this when it's exported to a mixdown too?

Right, I ran no plug-ins during recording. I also monitored the recording and if I had seen that happening i would've stopped the recording session. What you heard in the video was an export of that section, and i first noticed it when starting editing and seeing these waveforms: 

[Tyler Horton]

Just wanted to pop in here and say that this is recorded on one computer then transferred to a thumb drive and put onto a different computer. the original recording is fine and doesn't have these issues, so i'm thinking the flash drive is the issue. thank you for trying to help!

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, this is looking like some kind of sync fail or a disk write error or something. I've never seen anything like this in all the years I've been using Cakewalk stuff myself, but it's certainly a possibility something got tangled when this was being recorded. The closest thing I've heard is a corrupted audio track on an MP4 doing something similar, which failed after a transfer error - very similar noise to this. 

If you open this particular WAV in a different program (Audacity, perhaps? It's free) is it still broken there? I might just need to be re-imported but at this point it's seeming like a bit of a long-shot, honestly.

EDIT: Ahh, didn't see your second post before my reply. That's exactly what happened to the MP4 that I was talking about above. I agree - I reckon this is a copy error, like you suggested.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Lord Tim