Crackling Sound with 8.2.7 - solved

[darienx]

Hello everyone, I am looking for help here, I have a crackle issue and I have read about 100 threads of people who had similar issues but either
the thread went cold or it wasn't a solution for me.

What is happening:

in full screen mode where the DAW is taking up the screen and the bar in the time line starts to move or the meters on the level indicator animate... the pops and crackles start.
it goes away some:
when another UI pops up and dominates the screen.
when the error correction is adjusted is lowers the the number of occurring pops and crackles.

this issue is very locked into what the DAW is drawing on the screen and what the cursor bar in the step editor area is doing.

also< I was only using vsti's, not playing audio tracks, or streaming from disk.

What I have done so far:
Built a new machine with some older new parts:
q6600
asus p5k-vm
nvidia 8600gts
2 tb sata internal drive
RME multifaceII
windows xp (32)
akai mpk61
CME vx50 v2 (midi only no audio)


I got all the latest chipset, video, bios and sound drivers.

(as of this date today)


** some results: when I minimize Live to just a desktop ... no crackles.
when I put live on the second monitor, hardly any crackles, but I lowered the buffer to 256 and crackles returned slightly on monitor 2.

Thank you.

[darienx]

this was a sherlock holmes kind of night but we cracked this issue.

first of all, there are so many reasons users have for that crackle and riping of your digital audio and knocking your beats off time.

In this case we had a second machine with a 64bit os and we had the problem there as well, what we did was burn the 64bit machine down and reinstall
win 7, the rme drivers and the stock win 7 video driver.

then installed live. what we did differently from this install was no service pack, chipset drivers and then installed basic updates to windows.

We used the latency graph app we downloaded to measure the core stability of each machine after each piece was installed.

Live worked, no POPS!

So this was an issue of a driver acting up, so by formating and starting over and testing each step you can control what was the bad driver.


AS FOR THE PC THAT THIS TOPIC WAS ABOUT...


that one we did not want to burn down and start over, it nearly had 40 installed apps, sound libs., and pluggies.

so I:

tweaked the bios
PEG/PCI was one of the switches I made, it was different.
unistalled unneeded services to music productions (this pc doesn't touch the net)

in the OS level:

uninstalled anything that looked like junk.serious.
uninstalled some old codecs
reverted the nvidia driver and unistalled anyting other than the driver itself... all that other stuff.. gone.


I got this system acording to the graph to a core latency of 6ms, and now I rock the live and 24/48 buffer 256
in a test project, I ran 12 tracks of vsti, external analog synths and drum machines tons of efx....
I never used more than 18% of my overhead in live and not one pop or click.

So by digging, hunting and deleting I saved over 8 hours of system rebuilding, and maintained my music production PC like I should have
in the first place.




I can be positive here for others by saying this, there is not one defacto reason why you get pops in your audio when the computer displays animated graphics
or something similar to where it needs to play audio and access the disk or video...

but if you:

start by building a workstation that is music only (no internet)
get your core os working, add your core drivers like vid, audio and ect then add your software daw and a latency graphing app
then just watch the systems performance, when the system is solid, back it up.
test each piece of code, app, driver you install.

thats it.. just observe what you are doing.


good luck and thanks for reading.