Cracklin Ropey

Yes, that was me and X1 up until about half an hour ago: Crackles and pops all over the place - during audio recording and playback. Dismal.

I sussed that the problem was between kontakt 4 and Addictive Drums as turning either of them off cured it....mostly.

Then I took a tip from a different subject from Grem about changing soundcard buffer settings to free up memory. I changed my buffer from 256 to 1024 smpls and it did the trick 100%, no extraneous noises!

But now, I don't know why?

Anyone like to enlighten this semi-laymanish-artist as to why that little tweak did the trick?

Thanks

rbowser


The drawback to having your buffer super large is that there will be a longer and longer gap between when you hit Play and when playback is possible...

So basically, even though my CPU is 2.9GHz dual core, it's still the bottleneck in my system - I'm reading 1.2G RAM in Task Manager and Sonar has "committed" 1.6G out of my 2Gigs so it's not the RAM.

Ok, so I got really scientific and worked out that with a buffer of 1024 smpls, it will be less than a 48th of a second between pressing play and hearing the music - working at 48K. So I could turm the buffer up to 4'800 smpls and still only have to wait a tenth of a second. I mean. life is short n' all that, but I think even at my age......

Could this be an indication of a sensible way to do a master recording or mixdown to ensure absolutely no pops and crackles from the CPU?

That's given me some new and tangible stuff to play with - for example; direct monitoring is a good thing.

Thanks RB, very useful.

EDIT: ....I knew that bunsen burner and white coat would come in useful one day: Ok I just pushed the buffer out to it's max of 4096 smpls and my rig popped and pharted like a good un' - this must mean that the buffer is not big enough to accommodate that many samples. I made a phew tests and 1280 seems to be the max.

So I grabbed my Tommie Tippie - a calculator that's about the same size as a small laptop - and divided 48'000 by 1280 and it came up with 37.5: Now I know that 4'800 is a tenth of a second, so 37.5 might be milliseconds? I see now that the sound has an input and output latency - a round trip as it's called - so that might be something less than 140 ms. I think I can wait that long.  :)

rbowser


.....Just try to find a sweet spot for the settings, so you can have the buffer as small as possible without all the glitches.

I've just messed with that and 512 seems fine. With 1280, there's a noticable; though not terrible, delay when playing an instrument. No waiting about when pressing the play button though - and yes, a few seconds wait there would be too much to work with.

I've got a QX6700 and mobo here but I need a drive and a case to complete the build - I had put it up for sale; I've got another thread with some discussion about quad vs dual on the forum, but it looks like I'm going to hang on to it and set up another complete system to see if there is a noticable performance difference. It's also in a premium mobo that will take 8G of RAM.

It will be interesting taking the 5600+ carefully to the boards now I've got the software outboards to do it.

Thanks for the replies, constructive stuff.

I usually have mine set to either 256 or 512. I can go to 128, but any lower and I start cracklin' as well.