getting a cracking noise when i record

B

bakebeatz

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i have protools 6 and with a nice mic and a m audio FireWire 410 interface...

when i get loud on the mic sometimes i hear a crackling noise... i asked the boys at guitar center... they couldint figure it out... they tested my mic and everything was fine... do any of you have any suggestions of what it would be?
its keeping me from not recording... i have a pop filter too so thats not it.. and its not my monitors because it does it in the headphones also...
 
bakebeatz said:
i have protools 6 and with a nice mic and a m audio FireWire 410 interface...

when i get loud on the mic sometimes i hear a crackling noise... i asked the boys at guitar center... they couldint figure it out... they tested my mic and everything was fine... do any of you have any suggestions of what it would be?
its keeping me from not recording... i have a pop filter too so thats not it.. and its not my monitors because it does it in the headphones also...

are your levels peaking?
 
If the "crackling" comes up when you get too loud then that means that your signal is peaking. Turn down the gain on your pre-amp and you should be good.
 
I'm not a firewire guy, but is there any chance that there's a clocking issue somewhere? Random crackiling is extremely common when wordclocks are "arguing" with each other...
 
Dodgy soundcard driver, poor cabling, buffer errors etc.. could be part of it.

Start with the simplest tests and build from there.

Change the cable on the mic-test.

Change the buffer size for soundcard-test.

Update or reinstall soundcard drivers-test.

Disable any dig clocks-test.

Etc...
 
Apart from all the suggestions made you should also check your general system config, CPU, memory and HD usage.

We also have a FW 410 for mobile use on a PowerBook with Cubase and never had even one glitch. Then recently I hooked it up to our main XP desktop to do a few firewire tests and also got that nasty crackling. After banging my head against the wall all day, eventually I figured out that the audio HD (an old SCSI HD) was corrupted...

easy
B#
 
make sure the clock is set to the internal clock source.

i experienced the same thing about 2 or 3 months ago.

PM me if you have any questions.
 
...can you narrow the "crackling" down to specific things you may be doing during the recording process?

...eating crisps....screwing up balls of paper...standing on spilt cornflakes...or maybe standing too close to a fire etc whilst recording?
 
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idk hard to explain what i mean...

its not a loud crackel jus a crackel. that u can hear when i record and playback as well..
 
man i have the same problem when playin music thru my edirol ua-25, but when recording then the cracking wount be on the record. but its ****ing annoying me when im listening something...havent found solution yet tho :(
 
bakebeatz said:
no there not peaking


Are you absolutely positive no level is peaking anywhere? In your preamp? on your mixer? going into your computer? On a plugin? On your track? On the master out? anywhere?


It doesn't sound like a clock issue because it is happening when you get loud rather than just happening randomly.

...and for that same reason, it does not sound like a bad connection.


so... are you absolutely 100% positive that they're not peaking anywhere?


Other than that, the best I can guess is what Lord Thathidge already mentioned. :)


Oh, one other thing i just thought of... are your headphones or monitors blown (or are you overloading them) and getting distorted when you go loud?
 
You mentioned "nice mike" but didn't say what it was. It is possible to overload,and get crackles, but still not overlaod anything else through the chain, because those levels are set low.

It would be best to know what the complete chain is all the way through then better advice can be offered.

It can get crazy though. I have been plagued with a recent "digital click/pop" issue that ended up being a bad monitor cable. Now call that crazy. When it shorted it put crackles back into the computer and into the recroding.
 
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