Help!! Got a problem here.

[Bob Romano]

Can you guys please listen to this mp3 and tell me what is happening or maybe how to fix it.

A brief description:

When recording and monitoring the input through the program things will sound fine and then it will change to the example in the mp3. If I stop recording so does the distortion. If I change my soundcard setting to just monitor the input directly it plays fine so it seems its a problem with the recording process. It doesn't matter which program I use. If I don't monitor the output of the recording it still sounds like the mp3 attached here. This does not happen when first starting but may, or may not, happen after a few minutes. Sometimes as few as five minutes sometimes as long as 30 mintues. Sometimes not at all.

I have:
Moved the soundcard and reinstalled the drivers
Changed the video card (PCI-E)
reinstalled the software (Sound Forge, Nuendo, Wavelab)
increased and lowered the buffers

with no success. I have not been able to record anything in in one session for a while and it is really getting frustrating.

Thanks for any help.

BTW... playing back wavs works fine. No distortion or other problems. This seems to be only a recording problem.

 

[Q-Eight]

Very strange. My PC does something similar to that on occasion.

On playback in Adobe Audition when things get too busy (say I'm using Mozilla, checking my email, and playing back a multitrack in Adobe) it'll sound like that.

Might be a RAM issue? (That's what I suspect with my PC as I have 3, non-matched Ram chips.

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

Wow...I have no idea what is causing that. But that is one strange mp3, stopping the mp3 causes the last moment to loop until I play something else.

 

[georgeshannon]

Sounds like the latency setting is too low to me. That doesn't explain why it changed recently or why it comes and goes, though.

I know high bitrate playback and recording require high latency settings. Mine is set to the maximum (2048 samples). Also called buffer settings. Found in the soundcard control panel.

Hope this helps,
George

 

[Lucanu]

ditto, my Delta 1010LT is set to maximum buffer, and that thing happens when I try to play or monitor a recording when my pc is very busy.
Bob, can you check in your task bar application how many resources are your programs using (memory, CPU)?

 

[JonUrban]

I seem to remember having a similar problem when I tried an M-Audio card a few years ago. I can't recall if it was a 1010 or a 1010LT. I ended up dumping the card.

 

[Lucanu]

Sometimes shared PCI slots can cause problems

 

[Key]

Could be a couple of things. Sounds like a mismatched buffer size between interface and host to me though. Make sure you are using ASIO and if you have controls in the host software make sure the latency buffer match. Some programs it is automatic some it is not.

Download a program called DPL latency checker and run it. See if you are having spikes. If you are having spikes then you will need to deduce what is interfering with your system. Usually a piece of hardware. Go through and one by one disable hardware devices until you find the one that is causing it. Hint start with network adapters especially anything wifi. Also check that a piece of software isn't causing it - I had this problem with a diagnostic program that came with my motherboard causing my DPL to gradually increase until the system became unstable.

 

[BananaSlug]

Not sure if this is any help but... I have a friend who is a very good musician and he records at home. He disables everything other than what he needs when recording. This includes USB, he said that the computer checks USB ports something like 5 times a second for new hardware. If you have an old computer that is still powerful enough to run your recording application it might be nice to have a separate computer just for recording with nothing else attached or running. Good luck Bob, we all love your conversions!

 

[Key]

Yeah I do the same. Except I use n-lite to strip XP Pro of virtually everything I don't need - Networking, Security etc.. I also check which hardware is assigned to what IRQ. If your soundcard is sharing an IRQ with a USB port or something else that you don't use then kill that other thing. If it is automatically assigned to share with something important it is recommended to change PCI slots or whatever USB or Fire-wire port you are using. On older PCs and Windows 2000 you can assign them to specific IRQs in the BIOS but for XP and anything after it is done automatically. I spent a lot of time with trial and error fine tuning and striping XP so that it becomes a dedicated OS for DAWs. I even changed the logo to say XP DAW.

 

[timbre4]

If this suddenly started happening after many hours, I'd wonder could the soundcard be bad?

Would consider System Restore in conjunction with cards (including original video) in original slots to see if earlier success could be restored.

The sound of the MP3 seems like a *busy* PC not handling the audio task on a 100% constant basis. If the task load has not changed, then I come back to the card being questionable.

 

[Bob Squires Jr]

I use the Delta 1010LT as well for my recording both at home and on the job
and I agree with making the only thing running on
your machine at the time of recording is the recording software.
Turn all that other stuff off, for one.
Anything like uTorrent and etc, may screw with your sound
when it reads/writes to/from the drive. It does on mine.

I actually went out and got an 10,000 RPM SCSI drive (30 GB)
that I use solely for recording.
That also helps big time, especially with multi-tracking.

-Bob

 

[Key]

I run 3 Hard drives on both of my machines.
1 is for internet and experimentation - I basically expect this one to be polluted and a little bogged down
2 - Project drive with no OS
3 - DAW drive that is stripped down - and mean really really stripped down, almost crippled by some peoples standards. There are also no project files on this HD only software and the OS. All project files are on the project drive

There are all sorts of nuances to properly setting up a DAW that people often miss.I find the first thing people usually do wrong with older PCs is to use an incompatible HAL when installing the OS - you have to hit F3 or something when it asks about RAID drivers on XP and most people have no idea wtf a HAL is let alone which one is the best for there hardware. And using a generic chipset that Microsoft installs by default is bad for performance. There are other features that can bring audio recording and multi tracks to a halt - trying to go from memory but I think it is DEP or Data Execution Protection. DEP should be set to always off. All OS sounds must be turned off because they are at 44.1 and if you have them routed to your recording device while recording at a different sample rate it will change your clock mid-recording and you will get chipmunks. I could go on and on about the nuances and some of them are debatable which settings yield the most stable system or benefits for recording - AHCI vs IDE (vs RAID) as an example.