crackling noise

[McV13]

i have a gtx 1050ti, i5 3470K and 16gb of ram, some skullcandy headphones which are very high quality and my cakewalk is doing this stupid audio crackling thing.

 

things ive tried:

1. changing audio drivers, that didnt work because they just didnt produce any audio

2. restarting and shutting down computer

3. reopening cakewalk

 

please someone tell me how to fix thank you very much, all support greatly appreciated

[Byron Dickens]

USB microphones tend to be iffy

[Lord Tim]

^^ Yep, this is definitely a big smoking gun as far as crackles goes, as well as shifting things through VoiceMeeter. 

OK, try this: take the ticks out of everything you're not planning to record with in the Input Drivers, and untick everything except for Speakers (Realtek) in the Output Drivers, press OK.

Then you want to find where your tracks are routed to inside your project (perhaps to a master bus?) and make sure the output of that is pointing to Speakers (Realtek). Like John mentioned previously, you likely aren't actually running your tracks into the correct output in your project, By only having the Realtek selected for Output drivers, you're kind of forcing its hand a little to only use that (or at least give you a warning you don't have an output selected).

This should get you sound. Will it fix your crackles? Hard to say, but I'd be looking next at the USB mic if not.

[Byron Dickens]

Here's how to instantly solve 99% of your issues:

https://www.sweetwater.com/c695--USB_Audio_Interfaces?all&sb=low2high&params=eyJmYWNldCI6eyJQcmljZSBSYW5nZSI6WyIkMTAwIHRvICQyMDAiXX19

 

[McV13]

16 hours ago, bdickens said:

USB microphones tend to be iffy

its connected through some weird cable (idk what its called) converted to a usb and that isnt the issue

[McV13]

16 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

^^ Yep, this is definitely a big smoking gun as far as crackles goes, as well as shifting things through VoiceMeeter. 

OK, try this: take the ticks out of everything you're not planning to record with in the Input Drivers, and untick everything except for Speakers (Realtek) in the Output Drivers, press OK.

Then you want to find where your tracks are routed to inside your project (perhaps to a master bus?) and make sure the output of that is pointing to Speakers (Realtek). Like John mentioned previously, you likely aren't actually running your tracks into the correct output in your project, By only having the Realtek selected for Output drivers, you're kind of forcing its hand a little to only use that (or at least give you a warning you don't have an output selected).

This should get you sound. Will it fix your crackles? Hard to say, but I'd be looking next at the USB mic if not.

i dont use voicemeeter, the master bus is set to speakers realtek

[McV13]

one thing that is worth mentioning is that the performance tab at the top, normally its yellow but sometimes goes red and thats when the crackling happens (near the red actually upon further testing) - edited around 2hrs later

Edited May 10, 2022 by McV13

[John Vere]

Why didn’t we all ask for screen shots of all the audio settings in the beginning. Would have saved a lot of guessing and typing. Make mental note to self. 

But the good news is we are getting closer to solving your issues. I feel dumb for not asking for more info to start with and just assumed this was a case of only playback with a typical on board Realtek system. You actually have a lot of stuff connected and this makes matters that much more complicated. 
 

Now we find there’s a few low budget usb devices involved and it doesn’t take much to guess why WASAPI mode won’t work. 

Edited May 10, 2022 by John Vere

[Lord Tim]

Dodgy hardware aside, if your performance meter is in the yellow and then pegging to the red, that means your machine is struggling to keep up with what you're doing.

What effects are you running in your project? Are you running any other software when you're trying to record? (This also goes for stuff running in the background too, like any streaming gear, gaming stuff, etc.)

[Byron Dickens]

3 hours ago, McV13 said:

its connected through some weird cable (idk what its called) converted to a usb and that isnt the issue

That absolutely is one of your issues.

I told you how to fix this once and for all.

[John Vere]

What I see is a list of junk you don't need or want on the device lists. 

You are attempting to use a few devices that are designed for Podcasting and are normally problematic when used for Home Studio recording with a DAW. 

System is OK because it passes the Latency Monitor test with flying colours.  The CPU spikes are therefore caused by something else, most likely one of these low budget audio devices.  Lets get rid of all that so we can get WASAPI and your realtek working as it should and then you can start replacing devices with things that are known to work with a DAW. 

The Samson Co1u was discontinued and its generic driver ( W7)  will not support WASAPI which I will guess is the heart of the issue here. Unplug it and uncheck from list. 

Voicemeter while found to be harmless should be completely removed from your system as it "could" cause issues and you really don't need it.  

I would go into the Windows setting like I show in the video and disable all device except your Realtek Speaker output. 

Now open Cakewalk and choose WASAPI shared or Exclusive and play the metronome as I show in the video. You may want to watch it a 4th time and just carefully do what I say. Now drag any audio file into Cakewalk and it should play without crackles. 

If your plans are to record with a microphone you will defiantly need a proper USB audio interface. The type with a XLR connection. USB mikes are for Podcasting and have a long history of not working with Cakewalk or any DAW unless you own a Mac. 

Good luck and keep us posted. The folks here really do want to make this work for you and we won't  give up until it does ?

Edited May 10, 2022 by John Vere

[McV13]

2 hours ago, John Vere said:

Why didn’t we all ask for screen shots of all the audio settings in the beginning. Would have saved a lot of guessing and typing. Make mental note to self. 

But the good news is we are getting closer to solving your issues. I feel dumb for not asking for more info to start with and just assumed this was a case of only playback with a typical on board Realtek system. You actually have a lot of stuff connected and this makes matters that much more complicated. 
 

Now we find there’s a few low budget usb devices involved and it doesn’t take much to guess why WASAPI mode won’t work. 

bro dw not ur fault, is that why doesnt wasapi work?

[McV13]

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Dodgy hardware aside, if your performance meter is in the yellow and then pegging to the red, that means your machine is struggling to keep up with what you're doing.

What effects are you running in your project? Are you running any other software when you're trying to record? (This also goes for stuff running in the background too, like any streaming gear, gaming stuff, etc.)

in 1 of the projects i had 2 TH3's, 1 snap heap, 1 channel tools, 1 compressor and 3 reaEQ's (overall)

in the other i had 2 saturators,  2 snap heaps,  2 bias fx, 2 graillon 2,3TH3's, 1 compressor, 2 flangers and 1 valfreq echo

[McV13]

2 hours ago, bdickens said:

That absolutely is one of your issues.

I told you how to fix this once and for all.

i havent used my mic

[McV13]

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

What I see is a list of junk you don't need or want on the device lists. 

You are attempting to use a few devices that are designed for Podcasting and are normally problematic when used for Home Studio recording with a DAW. 

System is OK because it passes the Latency Monitor test with flying colours.  The CPU spikes are therefore caused by something else, most likely one of these low budget audio devices.  Lets get rid of all that so we can get WASAPI and your realtek working as it should and then you can start replacing devices with things that are known to work with a DAW. 

The Samson Co1u was discontinued and its generic driver ( W7)  will not support WASAPI which I will guess is the heart of the issue here. Unplug it and uncheck from list. 

Voicemeter while found to be harmless should be completely removed from your system as it "could" cause issues and you really don't need it.  

I would go into the Windows setting like I show in the video and disable all device except your Realtek Speaker output. 

Now open Cakewalk and choose WASAPI shared or Exclusive and play the metronome as I show in the video. You may want to watch it a 4th time and just carefully do what I say. Now drag any audio file into Cakewalk and it should play without crackles. 

If your plans are to record with a microphone you will defiantly need a proper USB audio interface. The type with a XLR connection. USB mikes are for Podcasting and have a long history of not working with Cakewalk or any DAW unless you own a Mac. 

Good luck and keep us posted. The folks here really do want to make this work for you and we won't  give up until it does ?

just disabled voicemeter and all the other stuff, wasapi works now, still stutters but not nearly as badly as before (making progress, very cool )

[Byron Dickens]

29 minutes ago, McV13 said:

i havent used my mic

Doesn't matter. Its there and its selected as an input device.

[Lord Tim]

29 minutes ago, McV13 said:

in 1 of the projects i had 2 TH3's, 1 snap heap, 1 channel tools, 1 compressor and 3 reaEQ's (overall)

in the other i had 2 saturators,  2 snap heaps,  2 bias fx, 2 graillon 2,3TH3's, 1 compressor, 2 flangers and 1 valfreq echo

OK, this is a heavy lot of effects for the kind of system you're running. Bias and TH3 will bring an older i5 to its knees if you have a bunch of them in your project, and that's 100% compounded by not having a proper audio interface, and all of the other junk running at once. I'd almost guarantee your system is also running a bunch of other stuff that's sapping CPU cycles too, and not properly set up for audio recording.

The previous 2 replies aside from mine are right on the money. If you clean it up, you'll be in a much better position to do what you want, but you'll still definitely need to think about freezing tracks to take the effects offline, especially the amp sims and, depending on what you have running inside Snap Heap, those too.

[John Vere]

3 hours ago, McV13 said:

just disabled voicemeter and all the other stuff, wasapi works now, still stutters but not nearly as badly as before (making progress, very cool )

Ok yes progress is happening at a rapid pace. Next suggestion is to try and increase your buffers and see if that works. To me your computer should not barf on that few plug ins.  But as you add stuff you sometimes have to increase buffer to more than 256 which is a sort of normal setting. 

[John Vere]

I opened a fairly busy project on my i5 Office computer so you could see that for me it works fine.  I'm using WASAPI shared because I need to run other music apps and watch You Tubes. My buffer seems to default to 480 samples which might vary from machine to machine. WASAPI shared does not let me adjust the buffer size but WASAPI Exclusive will.  So if you need to increase your buffer you'll need to switch to Exclusive mode. 

I took some screen shots so you can compare setting. 

Here's my specs which are pretty close to yours. 

 

Here's the project running and playing a song with about 12 different plug ins running plus a few VST instruments as well. You can see my cores are not even breaking a sweat. 

Here's my Latency monitor report look like yours I guess. This is with Cakewalk and Google chrome running. 

Here's my Audio preference settings 

Edited May 10, 2022 by John Vere

[McV13]

On 5/10/2022 at 7:52 PM, Lord Tim said:

OK, this is a heavy lot of effects for the kind of system you're running. Bias and TH3 will bring an older i5 to its knees if you have a bunch of them in your project, and that's 100% compounded by not having a proper audio interface, and all of the other junk running at once. I'd almost guarantee your system is also running a bunch of other stuff that's sapping CPU cycles too, and not properly set up for audio recording.

The previous 2 replies aside from mine are right on the money. If you clean it up, you'll be in a much better position to do what you want, but you'll still definitely need to think about freezing tracks to take the effects offline, especially the amp sims and, depending on what you have running inside Snap Heap, those too.

clean what up? im confused srry

[McV13]

On 5/11/2022 at 12:09 AM, John Vere said:

I opened a fairly busy project on my i5 Office computer so you could see that for me it works fine.  I'm using WASAPI shared because I need to run other music apps and watch You Tubes. My buffer seems to default to 480 samples which might vary from machine to machine. WASAPI shared does not let me adjust the buffer size but WASAPI Exclusive will.  So if you need to increase your buffer you'll need to switch to Exclusive mode. 

I took some screen shots so you can compare setting. 

Here's my specs which are pretty close to yours. 

 

Here's the project running and playing a song with about 12 different plug ins running plus a few VST instruments as well. You can see my cores are not even breaking a sweat. 

Here's my Latency monitor report look like yours I guess. This is with Cakewalk and Google chrome running. 

Here's my Audio preference settings 

my dithering is selected to none, what is dithering just wondering thanks