Random popping and clicking during playback (not heard in Bounce)

[AtomicSalt]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to Pro Tools (First) and I've been using it for a couple of months now. Ever since I started out I've been hearing random clicking and popping noices during playback. I've been searching this forum for a while now and so far I haven't been able to find a fix for the problem. If anyone here could suggest possible solutions that would be great! I've found so little posts about this exact issue that I started wondering wether my Scarlett Solo just came in broken. Hardware specs etc. are all the way down.

The clicks and pops are:

• Hearable at random intervals: sometimes not at all, sometimes all the time.
• Are heard during playback of instrument recordings, as well as Midi recordings or anything I program manually (basically it can happen to anything I've recorded up until this point, which makes me think it's a setting/hardware problem, rather than a recording problem).
• Not in the bounce

Things I've tried so far to fix this issue:

• Alter buffer size
• Check if my CPU could be the problem: so far it's always below 20%
• Checked all different USB ports, re-installed drivers, made sure Windows doesn't turn of USB power, etc. (I have no issues with other USB devices)
• Try different Headphones

System Specs and Hardware:

• Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3th gen
• Windows 10 Pro x64
• i5-8600k CPU
• 16GB RAM
• MSI Z370 A pro motherboard
• Samson SR850 Headphones
• Anyting else that might be of interest?

[Ben Jenssen]

Have you done all the recommended optimizations?
They can be found here:
Help Us Help You

[Darryl Ramm]

Hi Welcome to DUC

By instrument recordings do you mean VIs or audio recordings of instruments? I'm going to assume you mean recording MIDI for VIs... but what VIs are you using? Some might be just flakey/buggy. If you say are using keyboard VIs just try switching to Mini Grand (a simple widely used very stable keyboard/piano VI)and see if you get pops and clicks with that.

Oh and got to ask... what sample rate are you working at. If you are higher than say 48kHz you might want to try a test at 44.1 or 48 to see what happens. Sometimes new users do stuff like try to work at 192 kHz. Not a good idea.

Make sure ignore errors is not checked in the playback engine dialog, it's evil and you normally should not have it turned on. If it was and you turned it off do you now get AAE errors? If so, great... solve those errors.

When you say not in bounce. Are you bouncing real time or not? I'm guessing real time. Try the other way and see if they occur there.

You are listening to the bounce the same way as when tracking/mixing? Though the same interface, same monitor controller, same speakers/monitors? Just be careful this is not a noise coming into your monitoring system.

[AtomicSalt]

Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen

Have you done all the recommended optimizations?
They can be found here:
Help Us Help You

Yes I tried everything in the guide. Unfortunately it hasn't helped.

[climber]

is your cell phone near your monitor controller or interface? when mine is in the same vicinity I hear random noise...

[AtomicSalt]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Hi Welcome to DUC

By instrument recordings do you mean VIs or audio recordings of instruments? I'm going to assume you mean recording MIDI for VIs... but what VIs are you using? Some might be just flakey/buggy. If you say are using keyboard VIs just try switching to Mini Grand (a simple widely used very stable keyboard/piano VI)and see if you get pops and clicks with that.

Oh and got to ask... what sample rate are you working at. If you are higher than say 48kHz you might want to try a test at 44.1 or 48 to see what happens. Sometimes new users do stuff like try to work at 192 kHz. Not a good idea.

Make sure ignore errors is not checked in the playback engine dialog, it's evil and you normally should not have it turned on. If it was and you turned it off do you now get AAE errors? If so, great... solve those errors.

When you say not in bounce. Are you bouncing real time or not? I'm guessing real time. Try the other way and see if they occur there.

You are listening to the bounce the same way as when tracking/mixing? Though the same interface, same monitor controller, same speakers/monitors? Just be careful this is not a noise coming into your monitoring system.

Thanks for your elaborate respons.


In relation to your first comment: It's both. Something I should've noted: it doesn't seem to be connected to a specific track or recording. Sometimes I record different tracks and everything is fine. When I open the file the next day and play it back again it's suddenly covered with the clicks and pops that weren't there before. This makes me think it's CPU / software related. In the meantime I've been in contact with Focusrite Support and they had me run a LatencyMon test. After running that a couple of times I got multiple errors regarding insufficient memory and that I should disable CPU throttling, which I though was weird, since I think my current specs are more than enough to run Pro Tools and I've done all the optimizations.


Anyway, after that I updated all drivers and my BIOS, tried all different USB ports again, messed around some more with settings but unfortunately to no avial.



I'm currently recording at a 96k Sample rate, but I'm unable to change it to a lower sample rate for some reason. When I select 48k it automatically switches back to 96k



Errors are turned on.



I'm not sure what you mean by bouncing in real time. I've been exporting them to MP3. When listening to the MP3 file on either my speakers or headphones the clicks and pops are gone.



Hope this information helps. Thanks in advance!

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by AtomicSalt

• Alter buffer size
• Check if my CPU could be the problem: so far it's always below 20%

Just looking over the nice list of stuff you tried again.

What buffer sizes? If you are having pops and clicks try setting the buffer size to 1024 and see what happens. You may have tried that but we cannot tell from your comment.

Pops and clicks with small IO buffer size and ignore errors *on* is not a surprise, and running VIs makes that worse. Which is why first step here should be to make sure ignore errors is off.

Looking at %CPU unfortunately/surprisingly does *not* tell you if there is a CPU related issue here. CPU related audio glitches caused by high latency can and frequently do occur at lower CPU usage, some plugins/signal flow may also be constrained to a single core so looking at aggregate CPU performance is even less useful. Basically ignore all this unless you see a core or overall CPU use very high. Then that may be a clue to problems.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by AtomicSalt

#1-I'm currently recording at a 96k Sample rate, but I'm unable to change it to a lower sample rate for some reason. When I select 48k it automatically switches back to 96k.Windows updates or driver updates will sometimes reset this.



#2-Errors are turned on.

#1-this suggests that Windows is also using the Focusrite as its default playback device. Changing that so Windows uses the on-board sound card should allow PT to control the sample rate(so it stays at 96k)

#2-Turn this off

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by AtomicSalt

I'm currently recording at a 96k Sample rate, but I'm unable to change it to a lower sample rate for some reason. When I select 48k it automatically switches back to 96k

Errors are turned on.

The sample rate is set when the session is created. If you want to change a sessions sample rate you must do a 'Save copy in…'. A new complete session folder is created with all the audio files converted to the new sample rate.

'Ignore errors during playback/record' should be off.

[Darryl Ramm]

Adding ever further to Ben's clarification. Which is how I should have said it the first time...

The 'Ignore errors during playback/record' box should NOT be checked.

It's really important you get this right, you posted "Errors are turned on" which is really unclear.