The dreaded "crackle and pop" on a beefy system - yes another one of these....

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bunkaroo
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2011/02/14 09:50:32 (permalink)

The dreaded "crackle and pop" on a beefy system - yes another one of these....

I've done some research on this here but I'm hoping to get a little more insight into my specific situation if possible.

I'm starting to have the dreaded "crackle and pop" issue. First the the info:

System:

Windows XP SP3
Sonar 8.3.1 (but 8.5 and X1 are also installed)
Quad-core Q6600
4GB memory (3.25 available 32-bit)
Delta 66 (one of the later Xp drivers - haven't changed this recently)
3 SATA HD's with a separate drive for audio
DFI BloodIron MB


The project is about as simple as it gets - I'm simply recording bass tracks playing a long with an MP3 I imported. So I'm running two tracks total. No effects, no input monitoring. I haven't had the audio engine dropout at all and I haven't seen any spikes in CPU.

I did this same kind of work a few years ago on my older DAW which was just a P4 3.0 and the same setup and never had these problems so I have to imagine it's not a resource problem.

As I mentioned above, I've installed both Sonar 8.5 and X1 on this system recently, but I didn't want to use them for this "simple" project for fear of introducing variables not needed at this time. So much for that! I know during installation of the later versions it asks about importing audio settings from a previous version, but I didn't think that could affect an older version the other way. I know there are probably shared files between all versions, but from what I can tell my settings are all what they used to be.

I'm not in front of it right now but I know I've been running fairly low latency, like 5.8ms. Projects are 24-bit, 44.1. I thought I already bumped my buffer up to 512 but I'll ave to make sure it's still that way.

I've seen a lot of talk about M-Audio not being great with Windows 7 but since I'm on XP SP3 and haven't changed drivers in a while I didn't want to start by throwing a different audio card at the problem. I don't have any desire to go to Windows 7 any time soon, but I am willing to go to a new interface if necessary.

Thanks in advance for any help.
post edited by bunkaroo - 2011/02/14 09:58:27
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