Click, pops and lots of nasty stuff
I have nTrack set up on an older XP PC and it has worked in the past (as most of the tunes I am still working on came from that PC), but for some reason I cannot get the playback right on it. It pops, clicks, squeaks, crackles - all sorts - when I have a tune with just 3 straight wav tracks being played together - no effects/plugins.
I can take that same tune (copy the whole folder the files are in) into a different PC with the same nTrack version and all is well on playback
This is what I have tried so far…
Updating the driver on the E-MU 0404 PCI, then uninstalling and going back to the original version
Tried ASIO, WDM audio devices. Seems to play back acceptably with the Windows WDM (not the sound cards) but this is not great for plugins, so I would rather get ASIO working
Tried ASIOALL driver but get the same issues
Tried increasing latency in the ASIO panel - no joy. The issues diminish but don’t get resolved
Tried using my Behringer USB audio interface - no joy
Removed the driver and setup for the E-MU 0404, just leaving the Behringer USB - nope
Uninstalled nTrack 6 this morning and installed v5 - nope, probably worse
I’m all of ideas now. Do you have any?
Have you installed any additional devices? With XP I found that sometime USB devices would interfer with each other - a mouse would add a noise if I moved it.
You might want to try using an old mouse the used the mouse port. Go to the control panel and turn off every thing that you can and see if that helps anything. On a laptop, I once added a external monitor and it pulled so many resourses that I got pops and cracks like mad if I tried to use it.
hope this helps,
Bax
Well, you’ll need to do a few things if I may suggest.
DPC Latenacy Checker
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Grab it, run it, If all green it’s not hardware causing it. If you get red spikes or a lot of orange start disabling devices your not using in the device manager one at a time. Hopefully you’ll find the offender.
Defrag your drives.
Stop or disable your network lan.
Disable or stop all non essential items from loading at startup to reduce the amount of running processes in the back ground.
Disable anti virus temporarily or reduce it’s impact on resources through your anti virus options.
Hope this helps,
PACO
check the the playback frequency is the same as the files.
eg. if the file is a 44k wav. file, or 48, 96, etc.
sorry that is my only suggestion and something that happened to me with similar symptoms in the past, tho Ntrack can automatically create a proper frequency file out of a mismatch on the fly, older PC’s do not handle such things well IMHO, and the result will be crackles as you are describing.
dontcare
Hi
Sorry for the delay in responding to your good suggestions, I forgot to tick the ‘track topic’ box.
I have tried what you have all suggested but it hasn’t worked. However, I noticed that bring the 3 wav tracks into a new song on their own seems to be OK. It’s when I add anything to do with MIDI that affects it badly. So, if I set n drums to the track, I get serious sound quality issues
What might cause this?
to see if it is software or hardware related you can download
Audicity
and try it for recording a few wav. files.
If you get no cracks or pops in audacity during playback chances are it is software related, however if you get continued cracks than it could be hardware related.
btw, it could be worse, the pops could be in the actual recording not just playback, 192kHz is a bit much for a few systems, especially when you start adding midi functions to the processor.
you could try a little lower setting, 96, 48, 44 etc, also the E-Mu default it 24bit, make sure Ntrack is also set to 24bit.
dontcare
Hi
I have loaded Audacity and imported the wav tracks from the original song that I was using to test N. Same problem, clicks, pops, etc.
I tend to keep this PC off of the network, but I have connected it to see if there are any important updates etc. that I should try downloading/updating.
I’ll wait for this to complete to see if this makes any difference
Many thanks
Might be worth trying a clean re-install of n-T.
there is another although rare possibility.
I noticed in your other thread the use of a Behringer USB mixer.
If you are using this as the monitor of what is or isn’t coming out of your computer it’s possible the USB signal is gaining some sort of electric/static interference.
There are several things you could do to reduce this possibility, power conditioners and shielded USB cables.
I mentioned other things that might solve the pop/clicks in the other thread if they are software/CPU related, this solution is strictly if it is hardware related.
If your PC comes with a soundblaster PCI card installed it would be best for you to test the output of the audio using it’s headphone out, and bring those results back here.
this will go a long way in eliminating the possibility of hardware related issues.
dontcare
Well that was a bit of a shock. Maybe I ought to go onto the Net a bit more often…
.Net 3.5 and SP3 !!!
After these were loaded, I then got a further 93 downloads !!!
I used this: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep06/articles/pcmusician_0906.htm
and this: http://www.moozek.com/2008…r-audio to optimise the PC which got it into a much better state than it has been of late.
Just did some experimenting, this time taking a copy of N’s own demo song which has both MIDI and Wav files as well as some VSTi’s and this seems very stable.
I rebuilt the PC a while back so that I could use it just for music, but I guess I was too keen to shut it off from the outside world. So, even though I have introduced new drivers (via USB sticks) and such like, I forgot to update Windows 
So thanks very much for your help, much appreciated 
I’m glad you got things sorted out. I’m going to leave this post up for a few days and then I’ll move it to the tips section, as your links are very an important, like a good tasting beer in chilled glass. Thank you.
PACO
Moved to Tips & Tricks
PACO