Crackling audio, reboot does nothing to fix.

Check System restore.
Does it show an event yesterday or today?
Sometimes, updates from Microsoft can have odd effects on software. For a while, they were hitting my sound card drivers fairly regularly.
I usually restore to that point, or slightly earlier, and that usually sorts out much of the odd behavior.

I decided instead to update the audio drivers, that didn't help. I am considering just reinstalling CWMC4

EDIT: Nope, doesn't work, also the wave profiling is completely screwed.

Normally the program would profile the drive mode on startup when it has changed, but I had to go to the audio and click on okay before it starts profiling, and it didn't make a difference regardless of what settings I used. Before hand I also got this message saying that there is an error applying the audio settings, and asks me if I want to try again.  There is still that crackling. The In/Out settings got cleared out almost completely too.

Card settings are at 16-bit, 44100Hz as far as I can remember.


I would also like to point out that this is pretty unique to the program, my other audio programs, including Music Creator 2004 worked fine.

greg asked this above and you haven't answered all of the questions:

What are your settings in Options>Audio? In and Out Drivers, Playback and Recording Timing Masters, Sampling Rate, Bit Depth, Buffers In Playback Queue, I/O Buffers.

your latency settings are probably too low, we need to know the answers to those questions.

also I don't see where you told us what soundcard you're using.  are you using your onboard soundcard?

Guitarhacker


You need to answer the questions Beagle & greg asked before you go through the trouble and time of a reinstall.

The sound card is very important. What are you using?  

I have seen many people come here with the same exact story you are telling..... answer the questions and that will give us a better idea as to what might be happening.



sometimes it is a windows update but usually not.

Good questions; clear since the start.

The suggestion on deleting folders addresses his having already un-installed, re-installed with no difference in results.

....Okay guys, you are not going to believe this, but it magically started to work after I fiddled around with the metronome settings. After enabling the audio metronome for both playback and recording, and setting the output to None, I am able to get proper sounds.

I feel pretty stupid now.

Herb is right on here. Sure you can get some success with the realtek card, but it will cause problems from time to time. Crackling should not be fixed by the audio metronome. That is like the radio fixing a transmission problem.

If you are crackling there are several options. The synth you are using to playback the midi is overloading the sound card drivers. Or the hard drive is to full and there is little room to write the audio or data. The hard drive may need a defrag so the information is not scattered.

Also the line in stereo mix, and so forth are not drivers, then are options in the sound cards mixer. Drivers are things that well drive the card, you will have options like MME and WDM. One that might help the realtek card is called ASIO4All google it and see what you find.

Ultimately before you have a ton of success, and most of these issues fade away you need a true recording interface or card. If you have a laptop, then a good USB interface will be best, If it is a desktop that will also work or a nice PCI card like a M-Audio 24/96 will solve tons of problems.

It's possible that when using the MIDI metronome (which must use a soft synth if you're not using MME driver mode and the Windows GS Wavetable synth as your MIDI device), the soft synth used up too much of the processor's power, causing these audio glitches.
Anyway, I'm glad you got it fixed... and really, think about getting a better audio interface designed for recording (not a Sound Blaster). You can expect to spend about $100 for a good one. But don't go all crazy and get the latest $800 Focusrite with 26 inputs, because MC 5 can only accept 2 simultaneous inputs, either 2 mono or 1 stereo.