Crackling Sound in Audio from External Drives

[Rob Welsh]

I am getting crackling noise in the audio whenever I activate a sound from the library, even if it is a standalone instance of VE with only one instrument sounding, without even a DAW involved. The crackling sound is also in my recordings too.  This is making me think it might be something related to the external drives holding the library, which is an external RAID 0 SATA drive. This is a rather recent problem, as I have been using this setup for about 2 years. I ran Disk Warrior as well with no luck. One disk does read almost 10 degrees hotter (not sure if that means anything). Some help on this would be GREATLY appreciated!

Rob

Mac Pro 8 core

External WD SATA RAID 0

Caldigit PCi card

Motu 828

[Maya]

Hi Rob,

to narrow down this issue, I´d suggest to copy one instrument to another fast hard disk drive. Remove all of your content from your Directory Manager and add only the copied content and load some patches out of this instrument. Does this work without dropouts?

Try also to deactivate your MOTU interface and try "built in audio" to make sure that the problem is not caused by your audio interface or driver.

/Regards

[cm]

generally i'm not the biggest fan of RAIDs when we need sample streaming - in most cases you can't say how well the raid hardware does the job ... do you say you have the RAID-0 setup also since 2 years? maybe simply one member disk is about to die ...

 

crackling noise can have 2 reasons here:

- electrical (very alarming, source can be the disk, the controller or the PSU for the external device), can damage your motherboard

- streaming doesn't work anymore so your buffer runs empty regulary (should disappear when streaming from another single & healthy disk)

christian

 

edit: if your MOTU resides on the same FW controller alongside with another device - try to disconnect any other FW device except the MOTU, could be a traffic collision on the FW-bus ....

[Doogie]

I am getting crackling too, when I use any build past 3173.  I have no firewire involved.  I have a dedicated internal hard drive for Vienna, and a PCIe Motu 2408 interface.

I still get crackles after I select Internal audio, and disable the motu.

Crackling still happens without the Daw loaded (DP5).  I run VE as a standalone, and if I play one instrument - it sounds fine.  As soon as I play a second instrument I get the crackles.

I doubled my ram from 4 to 8 gigs with no change.

I turn my latency up all the way, with no change.

3173 works fine for me, except I can't use my downloaded instruments.  Can I get 3173 to see my downloaded instruments, or any other ideas about the crackle?

Mac Pro 2x2.66 dual core  10.5.6

8 gigs ram

DP5 (although it happens outside of DP)

MOTU 2408 PCIe

Thanks,

Dave

[Rob Welsh]

After some investigating, I found out why I'm getting this sound. I was directing several instruments to a bus that was holding the convolution reverb through the "sends" of each channel, and not using the channel's output to the bus. For some reason, using the channel's "sends" to the bus, caused the crackling sound. Thank you both so much for your input, and I'm happy to say that it is NOT the hard drives, like I thought initially.

Rob

[Gondwana]

Hi,

I have the same problem. See this tread:

http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/21575.aspx

I didn´t tested the new update and I hope they fixed it as Paul said.

Otherwise the Convolution Reverb is pretty useless when you can´t use the Buss.

Bye

Stephen

[rilesmusic]

Hi.  I've been having the same problem - crackling sound whenever I run sends through a bus in Vienna Ensemble 2.  And just took a look at that other thread (http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/21575.aspx).  I updated to the new Mac build yesterday (3711), and I'm still having the same problem.  Doesn't seem to be fixed yet unless I'm overlooking something.

Paul, please help us out!

Hopeful,

Tim

[Lowland]

I'm using the same build of Vienna Instruments myself (VI 2.0 3710) and it's causing crackling on every outside drive (and inside as well). It didn't two days ago. However, the only difference between two days ago and today is updating my Mac Pro to 10.5.7. It was 10.4.11 before, so obviously it has to relate to different OS here. But since other people are encountering the same stuttering (Richard Devine would be jealous and green and holding BT's hand their eyes in tears), there has to be something going haywire. -P. EDIT: If I open a pre-OS-update song file in Logic (8.0.2) and doubleclick the Vienna Instruments Player, it opens the "Show Window" button, but clicking that once does nothing. Clicking another time freezes Logic and I have to force quit. If, instead, I open a fresh (empty) song and instanciate VI Player plugin, click "Show Window", it opens up nicely, without glitches. I'm not having too many hours of debugging time at my hands here, so forgive me if I'm writing all nonsense. EDIT 2: The crackling is _very_ prominent if midi controllers are moved (modulation, expression).

[mplaster]

so have we solved this yet? My investigations have found the following:

• it happens regardless of which drive the sounds are stored on; internal or external.
  
• It happens when i send more than ONE send to a VE bus .
  
• If i open a second send, and route the next instrument to the new send, it does NOT happen; only when more than one is sent to the SAME send.
  
• If the sends are "active", but i pull the actual send amount all the way down (no audio actually being sent) it does NOT happen. I can pull one send up, and everything is fine, but as soon as i pull up the second send (to that same bus) the crackle-mania begins.
  
• It happens even on tiny projects, when nothing other than VE is loaded, and even with extremely small instruments, so i dont believe it's a RAM issue.

Dual 2.5Ghz G5 PPC, 8Gigs RAM

Mac OSX 10.4.11.

Logic 7.2

VE Build 3616

RME Hammerfall

[FredB]

@gyohng said:

Hello,

Very soon an updated version will be available, which fixes this issue. Please stand by.

Thanks,
George.

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