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Old 06-30-2020, 10:35 PM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Probably solved: the Radeon 5700 XT video card in my system is likely the culprit. Running the card in a PCIe slot configured as gen 3 (instead of gen 4, which is what the card actually "supports") eliminates the audio crackling. Anecdotally, you can roll back to a driver from 2019 and also solve the problem, but I haven't tried that. Maybe Radeon will fix this one day, but as of July 2020, you have to use their shiny new gen 4 card at gen 3 if you don't want all kinds of audio problems in most applications.

I've recently built a new PC for my DAW and finally got a chance to sit down with PT and have some fun.

Playing back a session I started on my previous workstation, I noticed some crackling noise. I increased the hw buffer size from 256 to 1024 and it seemed to go away, but then I noticed that it was still making the noises when I drag windows around in pro tools during playback. I also notice it when I am playing something back and then open another program outside PT so that it is drawn on top of the PT window.

It reminds me of the bad old days of internal sound cards that picked up interference from anything and everything.

I've reinstalled the drivers for my Focusrite Scarlett and ditched PT prefs and reset all the I/O settings. Not really sure what else to try. All my other drivers are up to date, etc. Edit: [I originally observed that] it doesn't do this when listening to music in other apps, or watching youtube, or anything else. Just PT. [This is incorrect, it does it in many other apps]

The PC itself is a beast, Ryzen 9 3900x, 32GB RAM so it's not getting resource limited.

Ideas?

Last edited by jurld; 07-06-2020 at 04:11 PM. Reason: solved?
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  #2  
Old 06-30-2020, 10:54 PM
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Pro Tools could be described as “finicky & jealous” … as it wants the computer all to itself and works best when it’s got it

For best results, give it what it wants

Record @ the lowest Buffer Size possible & Playback @ the highest

Drag your Windows around before you hit the Play button
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Old 06-30-2020, 11:09 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Quote:
Originally Posted by jurld View Post

The PC itself is a beast, Ryzen 9 3900x, 32GB RAM so it's not getting resource limited.
Yes but Pro Tools does not care about beasts. It is a fickle. It's not always about raw horsepower, and very often proper setup.

What sample rate are you running at? What GPU? (drivers up to date?)

Lots of good posts here recently about tweaking CPU setting on Windows. Not the same symptoms but I'd be trying them.

Multiple comments about making sure Avid telemetry is disabled.

Is ignore errors checked... if so uncheck it... you want to know what the error is. If you get CPU errors then you need to do standard plugin troubleshooting.

Make sure your system is fully optimized, every last thing done no matter how painful, at least while troubleshooting. Get rid of WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. uninstall the Avid Link and Cloud crapware. Set disk cache large enough to fully cache your sessions... (watch the cache meter go green after opening the session).

If you want other suggestion post a SiSoft Sandra report, that might show some obvious, might not.

And do your other apps use the same ASIO driver at similar settings? If not that's a suspect as well, if you have a different interface test with that. (just seen the "interface is OK, I tested with other apps" before turn out to be driver issues).
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Old 07-01-2020, 06:02 AM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Thanks for the feedback.

Sample rate is 48/24.

I just built the PC, so everything is up to date, driver-wise. The GPU is a Radeon RX 5700 XT.

I'll disable the setting you mentioned and see if it throws errors. I'm pretty sure the cache is set high enough to hold everything (there's barely anything in this session) but I'll explore that as well.

My previous rig never had any issues like this. Not dragging windows around during playback is kind of a sorry workaround.

I'll go looking for the other things mentioned.
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Old 07-01-2020, 06:18 AM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Ignore errors was unchecked. Checking it results in NO sound.

Noise is evident in speakers and headphones.

Am sort of tempted to install the mBox Pro I was using previously to see if the problem persists. I also have an older Radeon video card handy I could try out.

My Focusrite Scarlett is within a foot of my video and near field monitors. I will try moving it away in case this is some kind of weird EMF interference.
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Old 07-01-2020, 06:21 AM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Also happens with new session, import an audio file, no plugins or anything else.
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Old 07-01-2020, 06:36 AM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Turning off the windows setting for "show window contents while dragging" seems to get rid of most of the problem. It still pops when you drop the window occasionally.

Having any window on top of Pro Tools still causes it, but that is generally not going to happen, so...

So weird. I'll have to go back and look at what it is set at on the PC I was using before.
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Old 07-01-2020, 08:46 AM
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Have a look at this thread and this thread.

The first is extra optimizations above what Avid recommends - you should try all of them - and the second has information on Processor Affinity, which solved audio issues for me that happened even with all of the other optimizations done.

As always, YMMV, and you're in somewhat pioneer territory as most PCs built for Pro Tools use Intel CPUs and NVidia graphics cards.
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Old 07-01-2020, 02:52 PM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Thanks for those links, I'll check them out.
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Old 07-01-2020, 05:19 PM
jurld jurld is offline
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Default Re: New PC, crackling audio on playback when dragging windows inside PT

Setting processor affinity made no difference.

I've already done most of these optimizations, going to check the BIOS stuff next.
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