Crackling in a track?? I've not had this happen before

[Rahodees]

Link to track is below, there's some intentional glitchiness but you'll hear the pops I'm talking about, they are very obvious and stand out against the music.

This has never happened before. I'm using reaper. It's just a VST playing midi, then the output of that midi track routed to a second track which records the sounds produced.

And the result has occasional pops and cracks.

What causes this?? What are usually the best ways to prevent it?

https://soundcloud.com/kris-rhodes-8525 ... al_sharing

First one happens at :35, second at :40, and there are more afterwards.

[Rahodees]

A little experimenting shows it still happens when just playing back the midi, though not nearly as much.

[JerGoertz]

A few preliminary questions: Do the crackles always happen at the same place in the MIDI sequence? Are you checking your output levels to make sure you're not clipping? Are you checking your CPU usage to be sure it's not maxing out?

[Rahodees]

I misdescribed the situation in one way, because of course I did: It goes midi, to vst, to FX called "Emergence," to track 2 for recording.

I've now discovered this only happens when I'm running the Emergence FX, which is unfortunate as it's never caused this before and it's a pretty neat little FX.

To answer your questions, with Emergence going while recording:

1. No, it's not in the same place in the sequence every time
2. Did make sure, it's not clipping.
3. CPU goes up to 45% at times but floats at 19 or 20% most of the time. (It appears it only raises substantially any time I move my mouse--just moving it, not clicking or adjusting anything in particular, seems to raise the CPU level a whole bunch, but anyway never to 100% just 45 max.

[djdriver]

1) what OS are you running reaper on?
2) Does it still happen when you "freeze buffer contents" in the emergence plugin?

[rj0]

I misdescribed the situation in one way, because of course I did: It goes midi, to vst, to FX called "Emergence," to track 2 for recording.

I've now discovered this only happens when I'm running the Emergence FX, which is unfortunate as it's never caused this before and it's a pretty neat little FX.

To answer your questions, with Emergence going while recording:

1. No, it's not in the same place in the sequence every time
2. Did make sure, it's not clipping.
3. CPU goes up to 45% at times but floats at 19 or 20% most of the time. (It appears it only raises substantially any time I move my mouse--just moving it, not clicking or adjusting anything in particular, seems to raise the CPU level a whole bunch, but anyway never to 100% just 45 max.

It's important to realize that it's not so much maxing out your CPU as it is maxing out a CPU core. If you're hitting over 25% on CPU usage, a quad core CPU might have one of the cores maxing out, and thus potentially audio issues.

[Rahodees]

Huh, I wonder why it started doing that. Hope my CPU's not going or something :/

Do you know of any workarounds, settings to change, anything like that?

[BertKoor]

The usual fix is to "freeze" it. In Reaper that's done by a right-click on the track and press 'Render to stem track and mute original'.