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Clicks and Pops -- The Final Frontier


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Hard drive setup?

What hard drives/SSD's are you using, what is their speed and whats on each one? ie Operating system, samples, projects.

32 audio tracks, You say no midi tracks, all frozen, does that mean you have midi tracks but they are frozen.

 

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2 hours ago, Gswitz said:

From reading the image, it looks like disabling your network card would be the first thing I'd try. Then re-run LatencyMon and see where you stand.

Exactly what I said in my first post. # 1 cause of issues ( sometimes) Especially laptops. I always found disabling the Wi FI resolved my audio playback issues back in W XP days. Lately I've become none complacent and often leave my wi fi running. But the other night it attacked my system once again. Probably some app trying to update in the background. 

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On 6/13/2021 at 7:43 PM, Gswitz said:

 

From reading the image, it looks like disabling your network card would be the first thing I'd try. Then re-run LatencyMon and see where you stand.

You mean disconnect from Ethernet? The only thing wireless here are my keyboard and mouse.

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On 6/13/2021 at 8:27 PM, Tezza said:

Hard drive setup?

What hard drives/SSD's are you using, what is their speed and whats on each one? ie Operating system, samples, projects.

32 audio tracks, You say no midi tracks, all frozen, does that mean you have midi tracks but they are frozen.

 

No MIDI tracks yet.

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57 minutes ago, jonathan boose said:

External drive is 7200 rpm and 0% fragmented w/ 2.7 TB of free space. 

C drive is defragged weekly.

Still not sure what your hard drive set up is, this is the single most important thing in a music or video production environment.

It looks as though you have 2 hard drives, is that correct?

One is your "C" drive, is this a hard disk or an SSD, if it is a hard disk, what is it's speed and what do you have on it? ie Operating system, samples, projects.

The other one is an external drive that is a 7200rpm hard disk, is that correct? how are you connecting this to the computer? usb 1.0, 2.0 OR 3.0 USB C or firewire or whatever etc What is on it?  Are you using it as a recording drive or does it contain samples/loops or both etc.

Also, is this a laptop or a desktop PC?

Really need to know your hard drive set up details before looking at software solutions.

The ideal hard drive setup on a standard PC is:

3 internal SSD's

1 for operating system/programs
1 for recordings/projects
1 for Samples/loops

And also 1 more internal or external for archiving.

This doesn't mean that music production isn't possible on a single or double hard drive set up, it just depends on what you are trying to do.

 

55 minutes ago, jonathan boose said:

No MIDI tracks yet.

Right, so no midi or instrument tracks of any kind, so you are not using synths or virtual instruments of any kind, you only have 32 tracks of audio that you are editing. Is that correct?

 

 

Edited by Tezza
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32 minutes ago, Tezza said:

Still not sure what your hard drive set up is, this is the single most important thing in a music or video production environment.

It looks as though you have 2 hard drives, is that correct?

One is your "C" drive, is this a hard disk or an SSD, if it is a hard disk, what is it's speed and what do you have on it? ie Operating system, samples, projects.

The other one is an external drive that is a 7200rpm hard disk, is that correct? how are you connecting this to the computer? usb 1.0, 2.0 OR 3.0 USB C or firewire or whatever etc What is on it?  Are you using it as a recording drive or does it contain samples/loops or both etc.

Also, is this a laptop or a desktop PC?

Really need to know your hard drive set up details before looking at software solutions.

The ideal hard drive setup on a standard PC is:

3 internal SSD's

1 for operating system/programs
1 for recordings/projects
1 for Samples/loops

And also 1 more internal or external for archiving.

This doesn't mean that music production isn't possible on a single or double hard drive set up, it just depends on what you are trying to do.

 

Right, so no midi or instrument tracks of any kind, so you are not using synths or virtual instruments of any kind, you only have 32 tracks of audio that you are editing. Is that correct?

 

 

32 tracks of audio and they are frozen. I wasn't editing, I was trying to overdub. I was going to overdub a soft synth but when I deleted the synth the clicks and pops were still there.

2 hard drives

Desktop 

No samples/ loops

External hard drive is 7200 rpm connected via USB 3.0 to

Win 10 Pro
Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.40 GHz, 3.40 GHz
16 GB RAM
64 bit op sys
 

Which is where the C drive is located.

This system had been working, FWIW.

 

 

error checking.jpg

optimized.jpg

Edited by jonathan boose
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By frozen audio tracks, you mean that they were originally audio tracks ie recorded audio that you bounced or rendered "froze". Not that they were originally midi or instrument tracks that you froze to audio, is that right?

Also, I'm trying to find out about your hard drives and what's on them. What is your "C" drive, is this a hard disk or an SSD, if it is a hard disk, what is it's speed.

So if you are not using samples then I guess your setup would be:

Drive 1: Operating system and programs
Drive 2: (external): Recorded audio and projects

Would this be right?

Or are you doing everything on the "C" drive and just using the external drive to back up projects.

Either way, it's not ideal for music production, typically what can happen is people use a single hard drive to begin with and then as their track count goes up, they get problems and need to buy another hard drive that is dedicated to recording the audio. At a minimum, you need 2 internal sata hard drives, preferably SSD's, but standard HDD's will get the job done, although buying a new drive, I don't know why anyone would buy an HDD over an SSD today, unless for archiving.  Something like Pro Tools won't even work unless you have 2 hard drives, a separate one for recording audio on to.

If your recording to the USB drive, that might work but brings an unnecessary  element into the equation of USB connections when you have a desktop and could put an internal drive in.

 

Edited by Tezza
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On 6/13/2021 at 7:27 PM, jonathan boose said:

 

data 2.jpg

On cell here, so this will seem curt. When you see the screen above, stop the capture and screenshot the process tab with the offenders at the top (click the column headers as Gswitz mentioned). I have a really old post on the old forum, but the #1 offender is the network adapter pinging for connections every 4 seconds.

Two quick suggestions -

1. Hit the global FX bypass (e hotkey) and see if it clears. That will let you know a CPU-hungry VST is the issue like Craig mentioned. If that is the issue, need to start searching for which VST(s) are doing it.

2. Disable your Wi-Fi adapter and unplug the Ethernet connection and see if that helps. If so, LatencyMon is probably gonna flag your Wi-Fi adapter process, but all you really need to do is disable the "auto-discovery" Network option in Windows to cure it.

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HI:)

 

I've had this on my Studio PC "Crackles and Pops every 10-20 seconds" with 2048 buffers. Can't find the problem and then I went down to 1024 buffers and everything was fine again! 

So I now do recording with 128 and mixing with 1024 buffers. Perhaps the same problem on your machine? Please tell me if you then find out what it is....

 

Greetz;)

Bassman.

 

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7 hours ago, jonathan boose said:

You mean disconnect from Ethernet? The only thing wireless here are my keyboard and mouse.

No. I mean open device manager and disable the network card. I thought i remember showing how to do this in the video.

Edited by Gswitz
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The screenshot from LatencyMon shows the root of the problem:

     "Highest reported DPC routine execution time...   ndis.sys..."

Disabling Wi-Fi in BIOS or possibly just "auto-discovery" in Windows as metallus suggested is likely to resolve this.

Bluetooth drivers can be even more problematic, and should be disabled in BIOS if/when not in use.

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1. Don't run a wireless internet connection on a DAW. Only use wired connections.

2. Make sure your USB Selective Suspend is turned off. https://www.istime.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/USB-Suspended-Power-Change.pdf

3. The High Definition Audio Driver should be set to disabled. It seems to interfere in the operation of several DAW programs. 

Edited by Resonant Serpent
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On 6/13/2021 at 9:03 PM, jonathan boose said:

Funny you should mention that, Craig.

I just updated my BIOS and revisited the project. To my dismay, it was still clicking. 

All the tracks are frozen w/ fx but the busses can't be frozen. I've got (in this case, all Waves) one instance each of SSL bus limiter; Kramer Tape; Abbey Road Chambers; Abbey Road Plates; Torque Stereo; Scheps Omni Channel; and (2) AR TG Mastering. I clicked on 'Torque' and got the blank white box. Tried Scheps and AR TG and got the same. Then I clicked on the SSL limiter and the plugin showed up. So did Kramer Tape. Then I checked again and they all showed up.

Then I played the song and there were no clicks.

I'll check later to see if I can run a couple of heavy duty soft synths and see if I can lower the buffer rate to the point where I can record without too much of a lag to use the input echo.

Thanks for the help, everyone!

Does this happen with all projects, or only this one?

Do you have Sync and Caching: Read and Write caching enabled?

Have you tried Disabling all the Audio clips and enabling them one by one, to see if this changes the audio pops and clicks?

In the Configuration Settings, what is ThreadSchedulingModel set too? If it is 3, try setting to 2.

Going to be honest, but this does sound like your computer cannot handle the 'read write' from your hard drive, and it is bottlenecking when trying to read all that audio and play with this track. Audio buffer underruns will cause the behaviour you are saying that you are having.

If you unfreeze all your tracks, does your track still pop and crackle when playing it? Remember to move your Audio Driver buffer to Safe while testing.

I used to have this very same issue with Calkwalk, I then upgraded to a couple of SDD Evo drives from my projects, samples (Kontakt etc) and a seperate SDD for my OS.

Edited by zaquria
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5 minutes ago, jonathan boose said:

I only have 1 internet connection and it isn't wireless.

 

 

local.jpg

They are saying that you need to disable your network device.

Click on Change Adapter Settings, Select and highlight your network device and click on 'Disable this network device' from the toolbar.

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Obviously you can re-enable it after you check latency monitor.

The fact that you use a wired connection doesn't mean there isn't some part of your network card causing an issue.

If you disable it and get a pass from latency monitor, you next try changing settings on it so it doesn't mess you up.

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