Who gets clicks and pops?!!

[Robert Kral]

To the Giga Forum:

I\'m hoping this thread might generate more constructive discussion on the problem of clicks and pops whilst running Gigastudio. I see this as a serious problem because whilst the program could also do with other improvements, this one slows down my work schedule in a major way, especially when I am recording a final mix.

This translates into genuine frustration using an otherwise absolutely fantastic scoring tool. I am hoping that Nemesys might take notice of this problem very seriously, as I believe it to be the worst flaw of the system. I unfortuneately hear of new users not thinking the program is serious because of the clicks and pops: after all, the hardware samplers don\'t have this problem. I\'d like to see that comparison change and see the end of hardware samplers once and for all!

Anyway, browsing through the topics on this forum, its obviously a problem for many (most?) of us. I\'d like to see any stories of anyone wrestling with this issue, any improvements or changes to one\'s system that really helped or any theories on what the cause of it miht be. The system survey thread is great and it lists if people are getting clicks and pops. I wonder if we can focus in on that issue and see what we come up with.

Danny Lux posted a long while back about the Cacheman program that manages virtual memory. I haven\'t got that to make much change to the result.

Someone else mentioned turning off virtual memory. Is this OK? The PC warns against it.

My old setup ran on 250 megs without clicks. My new machines have 500 megs and I get clicks very very frequently. I don\'t think its polyphony related: it can happen just playing a solo synth line (just one note wih no others at all).

The other differnence to my old system is I now run house-sync to digital mixers. (Old system was just all analog). Could that be a part of the problem?

Anyway, let me know if you have any thoughts!!!



[This message has been edited by Robert Kral (edited 02-12-2001).]

[Jamieh]

Rob, I think the problem is that there are multiple things that cause clicks and pops. Machine overload, system caching, any interupion in the disk streaming, bad sound drivers, it ALL causes clicks and pops.

I was the one who said to turn off virtual memory, based on a tip from Nemesys that helped me out. But I was already only getting somewhat infrequent, and quite consistent pops. I was getting something every 2 minutes or so, which I think was Windows caching the virtual memory. So I don\'t claim turning off the virtual memory will help everyone.

As for is it bad? Well, yes, under normal situations. But strictly for GigaStudio is it not bad. Virtual memory allows your machine to use more memory that you have by converting part of the hard disk into memory. You don\'t want that happening while you are using GigaStudio. So I wouldn\'t run a machine with virtual memory off for normal stuff, but for GigaStudio it is fine, and actually preferred.

Are your clicks and pops related to when you play notes or send controllers? Or are they just random? I still get some pops that seem related to sending controllers when I have memory up over 80-90% and I have Cakewalk running.

Here is another suggestion from Nemesys:

There is a simple test you can perform. Do a wave capture of a GigaStudio
performance until you have heard these pops occur. Upon saving the
resulting wave file, open and play it in an editor program such as Sound
Forge or Cool Edit or a playback app such as Windows Media Player. If there
are pops in the recorded wave file, it indicates a problem streaming audio
samples off the hard drive into GigaStudio. If the wave file is clean,
then there are issues with the sound card driver/hardware interface.

[This message has been edited by Jamieh (edited 02-13-2001).]

[LHong]

>>>The other difference to my old system is I now run house-sync to digital mixers. (Old system was just all analog). Could that be a part of the problem?<<<
It seems be problem possibility! (If it is a case)
Does it have word-clock-sync (BNC) or just a TDIF/SPDIF/ADAT/AES-EBU, check matching samplerate (44.1 or 48khz, some is quite as 48khz), by default, the mixer might be 48khz/clock-master-internal. For best syncs/quite, the source-audio always be set to master-sync-clock (mixer is set to slave, for example).
Anyway, try to use the analog like the old setup to isolate where is the problem, the clicks can be from PC noise too such as ground-loop between PC and mixer/pwr-amps, power-supply (over-loaded), modem, USB, multiple-soundcards, Ext-MIDI-I/O, I/O, harddisks, mother-borad, etc. You will need to disable one-by-one devices (except CPU and boot-harddrive), my guess, most of problems are USB, other soundcards (shared-IRQ), modems, Serial-ports, parallel-ports. After windows boots, you could use system-property to disable/enable them on-fly without re-boot, until you found it (gone). Well, it would takes time, there is no short-cut for it unfortunately. If we can have our DAW, clicks and pops free, that could be meant that our audio-recording-jobs have about 50% done!
BTW, these\'re also assuming that all drivers should be the latest including GSIF must be good too!
Just a thought. Hope this helps,
Long


[This message has been edited by LHong (edited 02-13-2001).]