Clicks/Pops in audio export - question

[Jeremy Oakes]

4 hours ago, Rick Lang said:

I have the exact same issue as you Colin, and have had for quite some time. I also saw the same thing happening Terry in this thread from early 2021.

As stated, completely dumbfounded why this is happening during export, listening back to the WAV (44/24). I have a fairly well built i7 computer with 32 GB RAM, all SSD equipped, RME UCX interface with the latest drivers, no internet, AV or any other processes disturbing things. Now trying to export a finished, mixed and mastered  progrock-tune only containing roughly 75 tracks, and the computer/RAM or HD isn't sweating. Chirps still random on the export.

I will probably go REAPER from now on I'm afraid. After 20 years.

You could always change your i/buffers upwards when mixing and mastering, especially for such vst’s as Melodyne and Ozone.

i do that frequently, no issues.

YMMV,

J

[John Nelson]

Interesting, inasmuch as I have not had this problem in CbB but I have had it crop up in Reaper.  Slightly different, though. The clicks, pops and crackles were recorded along with random parts.  So, it was not just the playback, it was baked into the wave when recording.  In that case (Reaper), I turned off the ReaVerb convo plugin during tracking... enabled it for mixing and rendering...and it cleaned right up.  Reaper also has settings in Options>Preferences>Buffering that you can mess with.  Surprisingly, I found suggestions that some of the buffer settings yield better results at lower-than-default buffer values.  Anyways, not relevant to CbB but when someone said they were thinking of switching to Reaper, it made me chuckle.

[Rick Lang]

22 hours ago, Jeremy Oakes said:

You could always change your i/buffers upwards when mixing and mastering, especially for such vst’s as Melodyne and Ozone.

i do that frequently, no issues.

YMMV,

J

Hello Jeremy. This is not an issue during mixing/mastering. This is only during export, when AI is not in the equation. And always completely random in one or two spots. I have however fiddled with the export buffer size from 40 to 500 ms, w/o any particular difference. It could however be related to reverb tails from one of the many Altiverb or Bricasti emulations I have on my buses in this particular project, that the aud.ini file could possibly remedy. The Neural DSP amps are fine. A few years ago someone suggested ghost automation lanes still read by active tracks, which also seems feasible. 

[Rick Lang]

18 hours ago, John Nelson said:

Interesting, inasmuch as I have not had this problem in CbB but I have had it crop up in Reaper.  Slightly different, though. The clicks, pops and crackles were recorded along with random parts.  So, it was not just the playback, it was baked into the wave when recording.  In that case (Reaper), I turned off the ReaVerb convo plugin during tracking... enabled it for mixing and rendering...and it cleaned right up.  Reaper also has settings in Options>Preferences>Buffering that you can mess with.  Surprisingly, I found suggestions that some of the buffer settings yield better results at lower-than-default buffer values.  Anyways, not relevant to CbB but when someone said they were thinking of switching to Reaper, it made me chuckle.

Yes, I have already been on Reaper since 4.00, but SONAR has been my main DAW sine -99. Merely since Reaper has not implemented proper drum notation as per 2022. Again, this is not an issue with playback buffers and recording. The files are always stellar. This is bounce related with completely random placement. Feel free to glance through my reply to Jeremy above. 

[Rick Lang]

On 7/17/2022 at 7:25 PM, Colin Nicholls said:

Hi Rick. I wish I could say the problem went away, but I have no data. I haven't worked on a major project since the one described above. (A full-time job will do that to you, sigh)

I totally understand your frustration. No one should feel the need to apologize for using different DAWs, if they are able. I myself have Studio One although I've never attempted the complexity of projects that can achieve with Sonar. (I just don't need the hassle of becoming an expert in S1). If you do switch to Reaper for your next project, please do check back here and let us know how you fared. So often we see posts here about people switching but never any closure.

Just for the fun of it, I am thinking of mirroring my mix in CW in Reaper. It will take a while with all the plug in parameters, routing and gain staging. Not the mention the automation ... Just to see if the rendering itself will be clean. Currently 166 plugins in this project. 8 of them are guitar/bass amps. 6 of them are reverbs/delays. The rest various EQ:s, saturation plugs and FET/Vari-MU/VCA compressors on track and buss level.

I might get back later.

 

 

Edited July 18, 2022 by Rick Lang

[Colin Nicholls]

2 hours ago, Rick Lang said:

Just for the fun of it, I am thinking of mirroring my mix in CW in Reaper.

Considering how simplistic my final mix was (even simpler than Stems, it was literally one clip per movement and some leveling, EQ, and multiband compression) I should totally try this. Or try it in Studio One, even.

[King Burton]

I too have the pop/click issues on export. Became obvious during mastering. Vox track does have a long reverb tail that I'd like to keep somehow. I know this is an old post and maybe there is a workaround somehow. Any advise?

[Colin Nicholls]

Advanced Audio Export dialog: Try altering:

•  Format > Dithering;
• Format > Bounce Buffer size;
• Mix and Render > [x] Render in Real-time

 

[petemus]

I started getting clicks and pops in exports when there were enough Waves plugin instances in the project. Using real time rendering was one solution, but disabling plugin load balancing really made the issue go away. Could be worth trying.

[bvideo]

Also try enabling 64-bit double precision. Also, an audio buffer size below 256 will disable plugin load balancing.

[lee pritchard]

@Colin Nicholls

Did you ever get to the bottom of the problem?  I don’t suppose you were using the pro channel compressor?

I am having the same issue, but after a series of tests, I might have worked out the issue 🤞will retest my theory again  tomorrow.

 

[Gswitz]

For me, sometimes I bounce the track before export and leave it rooted through the master bus. Maybe I normalize to a level and export. The problem is it gets all the fx on the master bus applied again. 

Route the bounce track to the interface directly and problem solved. 

[David Baay]

OP's issue was almost certainly plugin-related. Clicks and pops from empty buffers are usually more audible in louder passages and are more likely to occur in realtime playback than offline export, whereas a tick in a quiet passage would more likely be due to a spike from some kind of DSP error from a plugin misbehaving under fast/offline bouncing.

15 hours ago, lee pritchard said:

I am having the same issue, but after a series of tests, I might have worked out the issue 🤞will retest my theory again  tomorrow.

What's your hypothesis?

[Colin Nicholls]

On 1/30/2025 at 4:58 PM, lee pritchard said:

@Colin Nicholls

Did you ever get to the bottom of the problem?  I don’t suppose you were using the pro channel compressor?

I am having the same issue, but after a series of tests, I might have worked out the issue 🤞will retest my theory again  tomorrow.

 

Hi Lee, thanks for asking. I was not using the pro channel compressor. Way back when I started this thread, I was actually experiencing the issue in a "stitch-up" project, where I had 5 or six tracks, each with a single audio clip representing a previous project's mix down, combining them in a single exported file with careful level matching and cross-fades as each movement transitioned into the next one. The final export was 16 minutes long.

It COULD, I suppose, have been plug-in related as David suggests above, but the only VSTs used were MLimiterMB and MLoudnessAnalyzer on the "master" bus.

I managed to get a "clean" export by replicating the project in a different DAW. I mean, it was a simple project. I just needed a single 16 minute export to include in my Bandcamp upload 🙂

After that project, I took a long break from serious music projects (my new job gave me very little time for it).

Here's the good news: I've opened that original "stitch-up" project in Sonar (complete with originally loaded plug-ins) and performed an audio export and listened through the full 16 minutes carefully, and it is completely clean.

Here's the bad news: Almost everything else has changed since I originally posted the thread: New computer; new audio interface; new Sonar. So i don't know how useful it is to say "unable to reproduce" :-). But at the time I could not isolate the cause, and it drove me crazy for while.