Cubase SX3 clicks and pops on playback of recorded sounds

Posted on Jun 11, 2008 12:16 pm
Beard
Member Since: Jun 02, 2008

Hi, ive recently encountered a problem with some clicks and pops appearing in cubase sx 3 on a project ive been recording.

Here's the background:

System:
- MSI K9VGM-V motherboard

- AMD Athlon 64 x2 4800+ 2.50GHz

- 1 GB RAM (onboard graphics card takes
128MB of this leaving 896MB RAM for
the rest of the system

- DVD Drive

- Maxtor 160GB system drive partitioned
into 2 halves, one for windows and
software such as cubase, antivirus,
media player etc, and a
"Recordings in Progress" folder for
cubase files, audio clips and all the
other stuff cubase creates when you
save a project in a particular
location.
The other partition has movies on it.

- Maxtor 200GB drive for music, pics etc (all other media basically)

- Delta 44 PCI soundcard

- Line 6 Toneport UX1 with gearbox
software for guitar sounds.

- Cubase SX3 using EZ Drummer VST plugin
for creating drum beats via the MIDI
drum map

The problem started a couple of days ago when my mouse locked up (dead battery i think) just before saving a Cubase Project for the umpteenth time. So i navigated back to cubase from Mozilla, and saved the project using the keyboard shortcuts (Alt+Tab for switching between windows, and (CTRL+S to save in cubase).

I closed cubase down and restarted again to reopen the same project and the project file (*.cpr) had become invalid/corrupted.
Pretty crappy thing to happen but after researching the problem and finding no successful solutions I decided, 'fair enough, I'll re record it'.

Since then I've been experiencing clicks and pops in the playback of recorded guitar and bass parts.
The drums sound fine and are handled by the MIDI so there are no problems with MIDI playback which eliminates that option.

When I play the guitar parts I cant hear any of these clicks and pops either when just jamming a practice take or actually recording the riffs into cubase;
it's when I play back the part ive just recorded that they start to appear, and they become especially noticeble after the parts are normalised (obviously).
So I was thinking that it must be a problem within the playback of cubase.

I tried two things:

1) opening the individual wavs in a
media player to see if the problem
occurred here and it did which seemed
even more strange, so it's not just a
cubase playback issue. It must be
something to do with the way in which
the wavs are recorded.

2) Exporting the whole project as a
mixdown into a variety of formats
(wav/mp3 at various resolutions),
some with just guitars, and some with
drums included as well).

It might be worth mentioning that I have tried most of the windows / software optimisations like making sure the transfer mode is in "DMA if available", changing the buffer size and sample rates on the soundcard etc, updating / uninstalling and reinstalling the ASIO drivers for my soundcard, making sure the correct ASIO driver is selected in cubase, and all that jazz, to no avail so it's none of them.

Also, regarding the use of my Line6 Toneport UX1: Having paid good money to buy this bit of hardware and the Gearbox software that comes with it, I have found that to be able to use it as a VST, I must download an update from Line6 and pay $200 for the privelage :-(

Suffice to say I simply linked the outputs from the Toneport to my soundcard inputs (as you would) and recorded the sound via the inputs on my soundcard, directly into Cubase bypassing any guitar based VST shenanigans.

This has not given me any trouble doing it this way but I guess it eliminates the opportunity to monitor the sound as it is being recorded into cubase because the sound heard is from the soundcard inputs, and not the sound coming back from Cubase.

I tried eliminating the Toneport from the signal chain and just played directly into my soundcard but the problem of clicks and pops still occurred, although quieter due to reduced signal level. So no joy there.


When I zoom in on the waveforms there does appear to be a few very thin peaks in roughly the places where the clicks are audible on playback but nothing conclusive as Im using a delay effect and the peaks may just be caused by that.

As i mentioned at the top of this post, this problem has only occurred since that project file i was working on had become corrupted between saving it and trying to reopen it. I have recorded a number of projects using the system and methods described and not encountered any problems of this nature whatsoever. It is something that has appeared in the last week. I have made no hardware changes to my system or added any new software that could be casuing this problem.

What I conclude from this is that the problem lies somewhere with the way in which Cubase records/creates the wavs themselves.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this problem? Sorry to have gone on a bit in the explanation of it all but I wanted people to know what I had tried so far to avoid suggestions of methods that had already been tried and failed.

Any help will be greatly appreciated as Im at a loss to figure this one out, my bag of tricks is now empty and Ive nothing left to do but shout at/kick it

Thank you for reading this exhaustively long post.

james

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