Clicks and Pops -- The Final Frontier

[Gswitz]

Well, cpus are complicated.

They can overheat. So when things get hot, they auto slow. While this is good for protecting your cpu while gaming, when recording audio it may not be necessary.

For now, i think you're biggest problem is your wlan.

I think your wlan device is still configured to save battery power. Go into device manager open the device and disable the power saving choice. I show how to do this in my video.

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Gswitz

[John Vere]

See I was right. And it doesn’t matter if wired or wired the internet will sometimes start doing stuff in the background that kills recording. Been like this forever. 
 

There is also the issue of the ridiculous high buffer settings and possibly the old school external drive. For $100 you could get a SSD external which is well worth a try. 

I have used one for a long time when I’m jumping between my 2 computers and never had issues. 

And as far as the internet goes I just disable it in the network settings. Easy to turn back on. 

[jonathan boose]

1 hour ago, Gswitz said:

 

I think your wlan device is still configured to save battery power. Go into device manager open the device and disable the power saving choice. I show how to do this in my video.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "battery power". 

Link to your video?

[Gswitz]

If you go to device manager, find the device and double click it, click power management tab, you can control whether the device can be switched to save power. For some reason this action kills dpc performance. So, change it to not save power.

[jonathan boose]

1 hour ago, Gswitz said:

If you go to device manager, find the device and double click it, click power management tab, you can control whether the device can be switched to save power. For some reason this action kills dpc performance. So, change it to not save power.

That doesn't seem to make any difference.

It looks like I have to disable it entirely.

 

 

 

[msmcleod]

Also check that a recent Windows update hasn't set your power plan back to "Balanced" or "Battery Saver" - make sure you're running at "High Performance"

[Gswitz]

Yes on high performance setting mentioned by @msmcleod.

 

If your network card isn't WiFi, it is usually sufficient to disable power saving setting. When it is WiFi, the Wi-Fi part can usually be disabled. But you know how to disable it... I was just trying to help.

What happens if you disable the network monitor thing? Or some of those other items under the network card?

Edited June 17, 2021 by Gswitz

[jonathan boose]

5 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Also check that a recent Windows update hasn't set your power plan back to "Balanced" or "Battery Saver" - make sure you're running at "High Performance"

It had been set to "balanced" which I think is the default and "High Performance" was hidden. For what purpose, I can't imagine.

 

 

[Gswitz]

did it help?

[jonathan boose]

It might make some difference but it doesn't seem to make much difference according to LatencyMon.

It looks like I will just have to disable the WLAN card for DAW work.

 

[Gswitz]

 

Don't give up. We all struggled when we first started recording with computers. Play some music. Feel good. Revisit later.

[Starship Krupa]

Whatever system I run, be it my tower or laptop, I always have some kind of network turned on, and they work fine.

Caveats: having both hardwire ethernet and wifi active at the same time has caused trouble on my laptop. So whenever I have it plugged in, I turn off wifi. Simple.

Years ago I chased down an issue with my IntelGigabit ethernet adapter and the light at the end of the tunnel was that I needed to get rid of the Dell/Intel supplied driver and replace it with Microsoft's. Once I did that, Latency Mon was much happier.

You can try playing around with that in Device Manager. Right click on the NIC and choose Properties and there will be options to update or roll back the driver. If you dig deeply enough into update, there are options for switching to the Microsoft driver.

But first just turn off your wifi adapter. You don't need it when you're plugged in anyway. There's a big button for it if you click on the Notification Center at the lower right of your toolbar.

[jonathan boose]

33 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Whatever system I run, be it my tower or laptop, I always have some kind of network turned on, and they work fine.

Caveats: having both hardwire ethernet and wifi active at the same time has caused trouble on my laptop. So whenever I have it plugged in, I turn off wifi. Simple.

Years ago I chased down an issue with my IntelGigabit ethernet adapter and the light at the end of the tunnel was that I needed to get rid of the Dell/Intel supplied driver and replace it with Microsoft's. Once I did that, Latency Mon was much happier.

You can try playing around with that in Device Manager. Right click on the NIC and choose Properties and there will be options to update or roll back the driver. If you dig deeply enough into update, there are options for switching to the Microsoft driver.

But first just turn off your wifi adapter. You don't need it when you're plugged in anyway. There's a big button for it if you click on the Notification Center at the lower right of your toolbar.

"There's a big button for it if you click on the Notification Center at the lower right of your toolbar." Not that I can see.

The router is an Actiontec 784. Shown are the instructions from the site.

 

 

[Per Westin]

On 6/12/2021 at 4:35 PM, jonathan boose said:

Win 10 updated including optional driver updates
soundcard driver updated

Don´t trust Windows update when it comes to drivers, my experience is that driver updates should be made manually, i.e. look for and download them yourself directly from the manufacturer - pre the February(?) 2021 cumulative update my DAW-machine worked fine, after the update it started crackling under relatively low load.
After having torn my hair and making guttural noises for a while I started looking for added services and checking for driver updates since Latencymon results more or less looked like yours - installing the latest network adapter driver (just Wired, not PROset) from Intel solved my problems.

The at the time latest network driver didn´t even show up in Windows optional driver updates.

I have also disabled the HDaudbus.sys through Sysinternals Autoruns since (AFAIK) it´s related to the motherboards internal soundcard which (like the internal videocard) is disabled in BIOS - but Windows 10 persistently wants to use and install drivers for. This didn´t happen in Windows 8 when you disabled something in BIOS.

Edited June 18, 2021 by Per Westin

[Starship Krupa]

13 hours ago, Per Westin said:

installing the latest network adapter driver (just Wired, not PROset) from Intel solved my problems

And that's the confounding thing: I was running the driver from Dell and needed to switch to the Microsoft driver. But this was years ago, and I think I've since gone with the Intel driver. With my Dells, I have the choice of Dell, Intel, and Microsoft drivers. Dell's are usually rock solid, but in this case, it messed things up with latency.

[mettelus]

On 6/14/2021 at 10:45 PM, jonathan boose said:

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

C drive is defragged weekly.

I had to read back through the thread to catch this. Are you putting project data on the external HDD? Having buffer set TOO high can sometimes be as damaging as too low, and HDDs need to seek to pull data. The 2048 buffer size on 32 audio tracks from an external drive could be a choke point in your throughput.

A quick way to test this:

1. Open the project, and do a "Save As..." create a new folder on the HDD and save it there (be sure to check the copy audio file option in that dialog). What that does is "bunch" all of those audio tracks together, so the HDD does not need to seek so much.
2. If you have enough space on the OS drive, do the same there so you have a new copy on both drives.
3. Try lowering the buffer size to 1024 (or play with the variations below 2048) to see if that helps. Start with the HDD project, then shift to the one on the OS drive. Setting to 2048 actually forces the audio engine to fill those buffers, and with 32 tracks that may be more than your HDD can handle.

Bottom line, when playing back audio (and the global FX bypass (e hotkey) is engaged), the audio engine is doing nothing more than streaming tracks from the source (as simple as it gets). If that is glitching, then the throughput isn't happening. I suspect moving that project to your OS drive is going to help, since external HDD (magnetic) drives are not known for speed, but reliability. You may find that working ITB (in the box) is faster, so may need to do project work there, then archive to the external when need more space (the same "save as..." routine, which also strips off anything not actually used by the project when saving it, so this also is a way to regain disk drive space).

[jonathan boose]

On 6/19/2021 at 3:42 AM, mettelus said:

 

Quote

I had to read back through the thread to catch this. Are you putting project data on the external HDD? Having buffer set TOO high can sometimes be as damaging as too low, and HDDs need to seek to pull data. The 2048 buffer size on 32 audio tracks from an external drive could be a choke point in your throughput.

 

I save the project and its audio files on the external HDD and the program files on the OS drive.

Quote

A quick way to test this:

1. Open the project, and do a "Save As..." create a new folder on the HDD and save it there (be sure to check the copy audio file option in that dialog). What that does is "bunch" all of those audio tracks together, so the HDD does not need to seek so much.
2. If you have enough space on the OS drive, do the same there so you have a new copy on both drives.
3. Try lowering the buffer size to 1024 (or play with the variations below 2048) to see if that helps. Start with the HDD project, then shift to the one on the OS drive. Setting to 2048 actually forces the audio engine to fill those buffers, and with 32 tracks that may be more than your HDD can handle.

LatencyMon lights up light a Geiger counter at Fukushima Daiichi unless I disable the WLAN card, so that seems to be the main culprit. I used to be able to use a lower buffer setting.

Quote

Bottom line, when playing back audio (and the global FX bypass (e hotkey) is engaged), the audio engine is doing nothing more than streaming tracks from the source (as simple as it gets). If that is glitching, then the throughput isn't happening. I suspect moving that project to your OS drive is going to help, since external HDD (magnetic) drives are not known for speed, but reliability. You may find that working ITB (in the box) is faster, so may need to do project work there, then archive to the external when need more space (the same "save as..." routine, which also strips off anything not actually used by the project when saving it, so this also is a way to regain disk drive space).

I'll bear that in mind. I'm going to see what difference just disabling the LAN card makes. That might be enough, but I should also get an SSD and just use the HDDs for storage/backup.

 

Edited June 22, 2021 by jonathan boose

[rfssongs]

Is evil Microsoft trying to update your machine without your permission. Or some other thing trying to update. This has caused all kinds of problems for me. I saw a similar suggestion above. This is a strong possibility.

[jonathan boose]

On 6/17/2021 at 9:10 PM, Starship Krupa said:

 

 

I have a real problem with being unable to delete posts. Makes me very unhappy.

Edited June 22, 2021 by jonathan boose
Because I can't delete it.

[jonathan boose]

 

It won't run at all if I disable the Dell LAN card. Unless I take 15 minutes to 'skip' every instance of Waves plugins.

Waves immediately tells me I don't have their licenses. Then it froze my computer when I tried to shut down CbB (see attachment). 

I'll call Waves in the morning and see what they have to say but if possible could someone give me instructions or point me to a tutorial so I can "get rid of the Dell/Intel supplied driver and replace it with Microsoft's."

Starship Krupa:

Quote

 

Whatever system I run, be it my tower or laptop, I always have some kind of network turned on, and they work fine.

Caveats: having both hardwire ethernet and wifi active at the same time has caused trouble on my laptop. So whenever I have it plugged in, I turn off wifi. Simple.

Years ago I chased down an issue with my IntelGigabit ethernet adapter and the light at the end of the tunnel was that I needed to get rid of the Dell/Intel supplied driver and replace it with Microsoft's. Once I did that, Latency Mon was much happier.