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Re: Snap, Crackle, Pop - VST Effect & Sound Card Problems

Hello all. Thanks for all your responses here. Below is a summary of my 
actions...plus I am corresponding now with tech support from Echo, 
including 
one of their developers...plus I copied Create Labs customer support.

I attached my email to echo too, which reveals some more facts. The 
interesting thing is that this popping/clicking doesn't occur with all of 
my 
VST effects (e.g, PSP42 and Filter), only some.  And there is also 
clicking 
when I activate or deactive a VST in the VST host, by clicking the button 
for that effect. Very odd.  Some of the clicking seems to be synchronized 
with the modulation of the effects.

Kris



> Sounds like a defragment is in order?

Done. No effect.

> What is your cpu usage at right now when the crackles start?

Very low. 10%. With this new ThinkPad, processing has not been an issue. I 
haven't seen it above 55%, even with Reaktor plugins running and some of  
my 
high powered plugins like PSP84.

> My first guess would be to check levels, if the sound card supports both 
> +4dBu and -10dBV, sometimes this gets reset to the other value and 
>screws 
> up gain staging.

Not a feature on this IO card. It is line level, no adjustment allowed.

> The next guess would be that it's some kind of driver conflict.  I would 
> have expected that uninstalling the Audigy drivers would clear that up, 
> but who knows.  Go to Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager and 
> check to see what audio drivers are installed.  If you still see the 
> Audigy drivers uninstall or disable them.

Did this, and in fact did a clean sweep uninstall based on Creative Labs 
instructions, plus removed everything from the registry. No effect.

> For the IO driver check the Resources tab and see if there are any 
> conflicts. ven though you can usually share interrupts these days, audio 
> devices are still touchy and like to have exclusive use of the interrupt.

No conflicts.

> Installing and uninstalling hardware makes changes to the windows 
> registry. I've never had much luck "hacking the registry",

Did this, no effect.

>uninstalling Windows should solve the problem.

Yikes. No way. I will avoid this at all costs and keep searching for the 
source of the problem. Echo doesn't think I should have to do this either. 
It's a last resort, blanket solution.

> Before you wipe the system and start again (and I'm not saying that 
>that's 
> not what you'll ultimately have to do), go to the 'Run' item in your 
> 'Start' menu.  Type "regedit" to bring up the registry edit tool. Use 
>the 
> "Find" feature to look for anything that possibly might contain keywords 
> related to your Audigy card.

Did this. Deleted everything related to Audity and Creative Labs, Sound 
Blaster, etc. I even searched for instances where sample rate was set to 
48000 and changed down one level.

> Might want to try "system restore" before doing anything else.  If the 
> problem is driver related, you should be able to go back to a checkpoint 
> unless you specifically disabled system restore.

Unfortunately, I had disabled this before the problem to free up 
resources...I wish I had not now.

> Check your multimedia/sound settings.  Try changing the Default Device 
>to 
> something other than the IO. Under Sound and Audio Devices, check the 
> advanced settings.  Be sure that under Audio Playback, the hardware 
> accelleration is set to Full and sample rate conversion is set to Best. 
>Be 
> sure that under Hardware, the SB is no longer listed.

Did this. No result.

> Turn off Windows sounds.

Already had this set. No result.

>> Be sure that under Hardware, the SB is no longer listed.  There may 
>still 
>> be some legacy stuff installed. try http://www.drivercleaner.net/

Did this.





Hi Marcel & Bill -

Per your request, I am sending you a detailed description of my issue and 
what I've done so far to attempt resolving it.

The basic problem is that I am hearing snapping and popping in my audio 
output.  The problem does not seem to appear in self-generating sound 
sources, like normal CD music, MP3s, etc, rather music generated by 
processing audio from the input of the IO card. In addition, the clicking 
seems to occur frequently when I am playing through the IO card, and then 
bypassing or activating various VST effects. For example, if I click the 
button to activate a VST effect, it clicks, and then the effects in 
action, 
lots of clicking and popping occurs. Often times, the clicking is in sync 
with the modulation of the effect. Here are the details:

AUDIO SOFTWARE

I using IO with a VST effect host program called Chainer. Inside Chainer I 
am running several VST effects, like Reaktor, PSP84, Cycling 74 Pluggo, 
etc, 
etc.  I plug my guitar directly into the IO card, process the signal, and 
then work with the output.

PC

I have a brand new ThinkPad T60p...it is a screaming machine with the 
Intel 
duo processor (2GHz X 2), 2gig of RAM, Windows XP Pro, etc.  This is not a 
buffer or processor constraint issue.

Before I experienced the problem, I had the system running perfectly with 
the above...absolutely no issues. Then I decided to experiment. I 
uninstalled the Echo IO card, and installed the SoundBlaster Audigy 2 for 
notebooks.  After my experiment, I uninstalled the Audigy and reinstalled 
the IO. That is when I started getting the snapping and popping. It 
appears 
that the Audigy driver/software changed something in my system that was 
not 
reversed during the uninstall. I heard that Audigy forces some change to 
48000 sample rate, so I'm wondering if a change was made to my system yet 
I 
can't find it anywhere, in the registry, system config, etc.

STEPS I HAVE TAKEN TO TROUBLESHOOT

I've uninstalled and reinstalled Chainer, IO, and Audigy several times 
with 
no luck. I even cleaned every instance of Audigy and Creative out of my 
system registry. No result.

I've tweaked my buffer and sample rate settings in Chainer and IO. No 
result.

I followed the instructions on the Creative website to do a cleansweep 
uninstall of Audigy. No result.

I installed the new IO driver. No result.

I tried a different VST host program, called EnergyXT, to rule out that 
Chainer was the issue. Same problem occured with the different VST host.

I am at loss on what to try next, but I'm still convinced that there is 
something configured in my system somewhere that is causing the problem, 
something that was set by the Audigy.

Thanks for help. I respond very well to email during the day if you want 
to 
exchange email on this.

I can send you my XP registry file too, if you need it.

Kris Hartung
khartung@cableone.net
208-433-9199