Distorted Robot Playback Noise

[azm892]

When I playback recorded audio on Pro Tools, playback is "pixilated" sounding, the distorted robot sound. I have my buffer size maxed out at 2048. I have tried resetting the playback engine, quitting and reopening Pro Tools, and restarting my computer. But the issue persists across a variety of sessions. Anybody have an idea how I can fix this?

[smurfyou]

You need to provide more info about your system. See https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=300050

Usually a clocking issue with a multi client audio driver. But who knows. That usually goes away when resetting the playback engine.

[Darryl Ramm]

Hi Welcome to DUC

Start at "Help us Help You" up the top of each DUC web page and read the troubleshooting info there, and also see the kind of information that you should provide there when asking for help. Especially here what interface and interface driver version you are using. What sample rate are you trying to work at? If using digital I/O how are things clocked from each other?

In future it is better if you include all you systems info in the post asking for help, I'm assuming your system info in your profile is accurate, but for many uses it's not and the more folks have to go looking for your systems info and can help you.

---

Always start troubleshooting by trashing prefs, use Pete Gates' PT Prefs tool to make that easy. https://petegates.com/pgptprefs.html

Since you are on Mac, and the interface/driver issues are suspect with these kinds of problems. You should try setting the playback engine to Built-In Output or whatever the built-in output device is called on your Mac... set the Playback Engine to just the output device and see if it can play back known good pre-recoded content or commercial recordings that you drag and dropped into a Pro Tools session.

If that does not help go thought the usual things, including moving all .aaxplugin files out of the plugin folder. trashing prefs again and restarting Pro Tools, that will automagically put back the core plugins, just run with those plugins as you try different other things. Including creating a new admin Mac user and repeating tests from that account.

[Tweakhead]

When I opened this posting I was expecting to read about some new plugin announcement.

[Darryl Ramm]

"Disturbed Robot" might be an even better name.

[azm892]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Hi Welcome to DUC

Start at "Help us Help You" up the top of each DUC web page and read the troubleshooting info there, and also see the kind of information that you should provide there when asking for help. Especially here what interface and interface driver version you are using. What sample rate are you trying to work at? If using digital I/O how are things clocked from each other?

In future it is better if you include all you systems info in the post asking for help, I'm assuming your system info in your profile is accurate, but for many uses it's not and the more folks have to go looking for your systems info and can help you.

---

Always start troubleshooting by trashing prefs, use Pete Gates' PT Prefs tool to make that easy. https://petegates.com/pgptprefs.html

Since you are on Mac, and the interface/driver issues are suspect with these kinds of problems. You should try setting the playback engine to Built-In Output or whatever the built-in output device is called on your Mac... set the Playback Engine to just the output device and see if it can play back known good pre-recoded content or commercial recordings that you drag and dropped into a Pro Tools session.

If that does not help go thought the usual things, including moving all .aaxplugin files out of the plugin folder. trashing prefs again and restarting Pro Tools, that will automagically put back the core plugins, just run with those plugins as you try different other things. Including creating a new admin Mac user and repeating tests from that account.

Thanks for the tips, I will be sure to follow these steps in the future. My system information is correct in my profile, but for reference here I'm running a 2018 15" Macbook Pro with a 2.9 GHz Intel i9 processor and 32 GB of RAM. My interface is a couple of Metric Halo ULN-8's connected via MHLInk Driver v3.0.18

I just went through all those procedures and trashed my preferences, and the session that I was working on yesterday that had this issue seems to be doing ok now. However, the issue has been inconsistently recurring over the past month on a variety of projects. I'll see whether trashing my preferences fixes this issue.

Now that I think about it, though, something interesting is that the issue started happening around the same time I installed Sound ID Reference on my computer. I don't run Pro Tools into it, as I print my mixes out through hardware and back into Pro Tools through the Metric Halo. But I do run the Sound ID plugin in Pro Tools. Incidentally, though, the session that was causing me trouble yesterday had no plugins on it whatsoever.

I'll see over the next few weeks whether the issue persists. Thanks for the help!

[noiseboyuk]

Distorted Robot noise is usually an issue with sample rate conflicts, not buffer sizes. I'd start there.