Sound issues: Drumatic 3 plugin kick drum makes crackling sound

[Zintack]

Good afternoon! 

I'm reaching out today as a first-time producer and user of your product Cakewalk. As the title suggests, I'm having an issue with a free drum machine plugin that I downloaded called Drumatic 3. The plugin works great, however whenever the kick drum plays it is accompanied by a distracting crackling or buzzing sound. It is only the kick drum that makes this noise and it doesn't change when I switch presets. It is only this particular plugin that has this issue too. I have an 808 plugin (Subdivine) on this same song that has a really low deep bass that doesn't make this noise. I tried deleting the track and adding it again, and no matter what I do the kick drum still crackles. What's really weird is that when I first added the plugin and wrote the beat in the piano roll, the kick sounded fine, even when I was playing the whole mix. I then had to adjust a couple other plugins and rearranged the placement of some clips, then later on when I played back the mix, this buzzing / crackling sound randomly started happening. Might anyone have any clues as to what this is? I would try and show you what I'm talking about, though I'm not sure what the best method would be to do that. Any help would be very appreciated!!

[John Vere]

Ok you just found out why it was free. I have tried 100’s of freebies and generally only 1 in 30 are any good. Some are so bad you have to wonder why they even exist 

[Steve_B]

Looks like its probably a 32bit plugin. They sometimes work ok , if you're lucky but most here would recommend using 64bit plugins only. You should be able to find something free and 64bit if look around.  Unpleasant noises, crackles etc are my experience with 32bit plugins on 64 bit Windows 10.

Steve

[Noel Borthwick]

Do you hear the distortion even when you freeze or render the track? Looking at the rendered wave may give you some clues.
Also check if the gain is clipping in your signal flow.

[Zintack]

Wanted to update: so it's weird, the distortion disappears and the plugin sounds as normal when i switch the sampling rate from 48000 to 44100 or vice versa. Then it works for a while and sounds normal, even during entire sessions. then randomly the Drumatic 3 kick will go back to having that crackle when i load the program sometimes so i have to do the sampling rate switch again. idk why that resets it but that's what i do now whenever it starts buzzing / crackling like that

[John Vere]

I can't believe your still using it. Just find something that works, there must be 6,000,000 kick drum samples kicking around. 

[Byron Dickens]

Yep.  Drum machine emulations are a dime a dozen....

[Esteban Villanova]

Drumatic 3 is a drum synth, and the best free one there is. Hard to find alternatives.

And if he’s having problems the correct attitude should be to try to find the cause in case it is Cakewalk’s problem so it can be solved.

[Xoo]

It's also a SynthEdit synth, and these can be problematic (especially ones using older SE toolkits) - from memory, they especially didn't like having "Use Multiprocessing Engine" enabled.  So I'd first suggest turning that off:

If that solves it, then you're probably out of luck as you don't want to turn this off in general, and looking for a replacement is probably your best bet.

[John Vere]

It's a 32 bit plug in which if ever there are issues with Cakewalk are the first things I'd be looking at. Cakewalk is 100% 64 bit because software moves forward. Cakewalk staff no longer are expected to bother troubleshooting 32 bit plug in issues. If it was a 64 bit plug in they would be all over it. 

The best solution is to purchase the inexpensive upgrade which is 64 bit. 

Edited April 19, 2021 by John Vere