Question

I recently purchased the online upgrade from Studio One 2 Professional to Studio One 3 Professional, and ever since there have been crackling noises in the playback of my recordings. I'm working on both an iMac 27' 2010 & Macbook Pro 2011, both with Yosemite installed. Mostly recording through Apogee Duet. I checked my hardware, cables, and instruments, but the crackling sound also occurs with digital instruments where I haven't used any hardware outside of my computer. Also the sound doesn't always occur on every channel, and the sound appears to have a rhythmic pattern and thus is not completely random. The strange thing about it is that when exporting stems and mixdowns the clicking noise does not occur on every individual channel, but rather 'randomly' occurs on some channels sometimes (so it happened to me that the clicking did occur within Studio One, but not in the export and vice versa). Handy information might be that the clicking noise is affected by plugins, so if I use an OpenAir reverb on a specific channel with that noise, the noise gets that reverb. Also if I arm a track for recording, without recording but just playing something to do a soundcheck, the crackling sound already occurs. The sound only occurs when playing a track with sound information, so it won't occur when I'm playing an empty track or just a metronome.
I've tried changing buffer size, turning off my plugins, reducing channels, tried checking my electricity cables/wiring, looked on the internet for the problem, but haven't found a solution yet..
It seems to me that it is a software problem within Studio One 3, as I haven't changed computers, haven't added or removed plugins, and didn't have this problem in Studio One 2.

Thanks in advance,

Rufus

Answer 1

You need to increase your buffer size when experiencing crackles.

Answer 2

Yes and not that its caused by V3. V3 does need a bit more in terms of resources, so in that way it is part of the problem. What you are describing sounds like the CPU not being able to handle the processing. When you get the noises, take a look at the performance monitor. You may see that wigging out, and would be your answer. Also take a look at your processor and system specs, and compare that against the minimum requirements on the product page. It may also be related to hard drive on the way out, or not fast enough.

Answer 3

I actually have a mac with 32 gigs of RAM and an i5 processor and it blows all the minimum requirements out o the water, and i've pretty much done the same thing as you ad checked all the hardware- Still makes a consistent clicking noise.

I actually went into my audio setup and made sure that my audiobox device was at 2048 samples or higher. That took care of it. I have nothing in my feedback now. I don't know what the point of the lower samples would be if they're just going to be utter ****. But that fixed it, just so you know.

Answer 4

Same same- increased sample size and the popping stopped.  Fixed.

Answer 5

Have you tried using a different audio interface, just to rule out the hardware / driver related slew of errors that might occur and cause similar behavior?

Have you checked if there are any errors logged to Console.app at the time this happens?

Search for "coreaudio" in Console.app after choosing Warnings and Errors filtering.

Might be some clues there.