Track playback fantastically distorted
This is driving me nuts! I’ve recorded lots of tracks in the past and am doing nothing different now. Recently though, when I record a track, everything looks normal on the Recording meter, and the .wav file looks as if it’s at normal volume, but playback is TREMENDOUSLY loud, hissy and distorted. Good tracks in the same song still play back fine, but the new tracks are deafening. I can even play the good and bad tracks together and they sound “good” and “bad”. Until tonight I thought it was a sporadic problem, because I’m confident the occasional recording was playing fine while the next was horrendous, but now they all seem bad.
This is on v5, using an M-Audio card’s SPDIF inputs and WDM drivers. I’ve reinstalled the soundcard and even defragged the hard drive all to no avail, so now I don’t know where to turn.
Does the problem occur only if you start the recording from the beginning of the song or also if you start it from say 10 seconds into the song (by clicking on the timeline axis at the point where you whish to start the recording and pressing the Rec button)?
A similar problem has been recently fixed in v6.0, it only occurred when starting recording from 0:00:00 in 24 bit mode.
Flavio.
Playback is distorted wherever I start it - from the beginning or from the middle of the .wav file.
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Playback is distorted wherever I start it - from the beginning or from the middle of the .wav file.
Yes, but that wave is already corrupted.
What happens when a new wave is recorded from somewhere other than the beginning of the song?
Soory, if that's what you mean you already tried.
Read Phoo’s point.
Switched on gear and it behaved perfectly (Maybe 10 takes)!
Came in & watched Neighbours.
Switched gear back on, got a good take from beginning, then several bad ones from beginning. Now they all seem bad when recorded from beginning but (Phoo’s point) all the recordings started mid-song are fine (maybe 5-6 takes)
Is this something to do with the clipping settings, do you think?
Gusto Belly
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This is on v5, using an M-Audio card’s SPDIF inputs and WDM drivers
Flavio
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A similar problem has been recently fixed in v6.0
Just curious if you tried N ver-6 demo to see if things are the same?
I would suspect SPDIF especially if sample rate was not correct.
(This produces white noise)
And since it happens sometimes (not always) then I would wonder
if the sample rate is being made to change somehow.
System sounds can cause the samplerate to change mid-stream, depending on the driver or hardware. This is a bug in something other than n-Tracks, and it’s pretty obscure or we’d hear about it more often.
Just in case, turn off all system sounds to see if anything changes.
Usually, the symptom is that playback will magically double or half speed in the recorded wave. The samplerate switch happens while recording if a system sound happens to play during that time, so the recorded wave gets corrupted. No telling what it would do when using SPDIF.
I suspect it won’t be possible when doing SPDIF, but you never know.
Turned of PC system sounds - no improvement.
One strange thing seems to be that the first recording is O.K., but thereafter all recordings are bad (that’s the tendency anyway)
I really don’t want to load Ver6 at this point - Ver5 does far more than I need when it’s working! I suppose one obvious thing to try is to reinstall N-track. Maybe tomorrow…
V5 instead of V6? If the bug is supposed to be fixed in V6 why not give it shot? V6 definitly runs with less CPU usage on my machine.
I’ve reloaded Ver5 and the problem was just the same.
Now I’ve loaded Ver6 and the problem seems to have gone away. Trouble is, I’ve lost all my settings (even though I didn’t uninstall V5), so I can’t honestly say that Ver6 is the answer in the long run, it might have just somehow been my old settings! It took me 12 months to record my first song and even then it worked-around timing issues that I never really understood, so I’m not looking forward to going back on the learning treadmill, especially with a revamped interface: just want to click-play-click-enjoy!
Anyway - I suppose that closes this article. Many thanks to you guys for your help.
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I can't honestly say that Ver6 is the answer in the long run, it might have just somehow been my old settings!
Well, the problem was indeed a bug that Flavio fixed in V6. Is it gone in V5 after having the settings reset? If it came back when you reinstalled V5, but your settings were lost then it would seem V6 is the solution.
Many problems can be cleared up by resetting the prefs. There's a function in the preferences to reset them to the defaults. Reinstalling has an option to keep the previous config or to create it new again. Starting over is usually a good idea. I almost never reset them, but I have have the occasional time it needed to be done, usually after making changes to a soundcard (reinstall or updated the drivers for example).
(MANY times reinstalling has been suggested when just resetting the prefs may be all that was necessary.)
There are things that can be changed out from under n-Tracks that will cause resetting the prefs to be necessary at times, and there have been reports of existing config files becoming corrupted for unknown reasons. Config files contain info about plug-ins, device settings (like device order) and a lot of other things that if not quite the same the next time n-Tracks is run could cause issues.
The interface between V4, V5 and V6 has not changed very much really -- looks nicer, but the main functionality is about the same. You should be back to where you were in no time. If you can't find something where it used to be, just ask.