Crackling Pop Sound

[tomyco]

Every so often when I'm recording I hear a crackling pop sound.

The equipment I have is as follows;

Pro-Tools LE, Digi 002 Rack & M-Audio Octane


The hardware set up is as follows;

Peripherals - Digi 002

Digital Input - RCA=S/PDIF, optical=ADAT

Clock source - internal

Sample rate - 44.1 (Both Digi 002 & M-Audio Octane are set up at 44.1)


Is this set up correctly? Any suggestions? Thanks!

[rockerdude]

I have pro tools 003 le with a mac pro and apogee converters running through various outboard gear through a 24 ch carvin mixer and I used to get those pops and clicks.Someone told me That it has to do with punches in and crossfades.There is a crossfade milisecond adjustment in the setup window.after I set it to 10 the pops were gone

[awath]

another thing that causes the crackles and pops is sample rate. if your sample rate is not the same throughout your software and hardware then it is possible to have the pops during tracking. I used to have the problem until i realized what it was, and from my experience is was only the optical wire that was causing it. so if the crossfade trick doesnt solve it then I would take a look at the sample rate.

hope you get it figured out.

[MetalDave]

this cracl;ing noises are from latency being set too low. You may have yto raise the latency a bit. this gives the computer time to keep caught up. There should be a setting somewhere in your software that lets you adjust latency. this is the time it takes for the whole sound to sucessfully get from the source to the hard drive. Set that a bit highr. If that doesn't work at all. if some of the clicks don't go away, you may need to set it higher or it may be some other problem. 90% of the time it is a latency issue.

[richiebee]

Could be the sync clock. We used to have this transferring stuff from ADAT through lightpipe to ProTools. When we changed the clock source, it disappeared. Can't recall off the top of my head whether we had to set it to protools or to the ADAT.

[RoyJeeBiv]

these are all great suggestions. if you're still having the problem after trying them out, check your H/W Buffer Size in the Playback Engine of the Setup menu.

ideally when recording, you want a lower buffer (i.e. 256 or 512), and during mixing, you'll want a higher buffer (i.e. 1024)

[rockerdude]

Cool I diden't know that....Thanks!

[adorian]

If on a Mac I also had pops from my wireless internet being on and displaying the connection on the systems tray on top, My problem was in Cubase but it is apparently common when you're tight on resources.

[MetalDave]

I never did ask... How much RAM are you running? If you are lower than 1 gb of RAM this makes all of the suggestions above not always work. 512 will work but certain frequencies will cause clicks and spark sounds. The sound I am thinking of is like someone rubbed thier feet on the carpet and walked up and touched a guitar or an amp and it makes like a small sharp spark sound. a really quick click. or like a signal cord got bumped and lost connection for a split second.

[rockerdude]

I had this happen the other day.I gotta tell ya this sucks!When I turned off my Pro tools controler before I quit my session A pop up said revert to original clock source ok. I coulden't close the session out so I hit ok.The next time I fired up my rig I got the dreaded pops.Then I had to sync up the word clock.Switched to adat lightpipe(apogee rosetta)this fixed it.Try word clock sync!