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

["jeff larson" <jeff.larson@sailpoint.com>]

> From: Krispen Hartung
> It's not that, for me at least. I have the newest version and 
> definition list of Semantec virus checker. 

It doesn't feel like this is your problem but while we're on the
subject I've been having a much worse time with spyware and malware
lately than I have with viruses.  Virus scanners don't often catch
these since they're not technically viruses.  The best malware scanner
I've used so far is Spyware Doctor from PC Tools.  You really need
both a virus scanner and malware scanner right now, though I expect to
see some convergence in the future.  Spyware can easily bring your
system to its knees and there are some clever "rootkit" techniques
they use to hide themselves.

> I still think it's strange that the clicking and popping does not
> occur when I'm just running through my VST host with no effects, and
> that clicking a button to load or activate a VST effect makes a
> click/pop sound, and that some VST effects that modulate produce a
> clicking/popping sound that seems to coincide with the modulation.

Clicking/popping that coincides with modulation sounds like digital
clipping caused by gain added by the effect.  This might also explain
why sound generating plugins don't exhibit the same problem.  Is the
input signal from the Echo unusually hot?  Can you back it down a bit
in a software mixer?

It doesn't explain why you would get clicks just activating the plugin
though, unless you happened to activate it at the same time it was in
it's high gain phase.

Assuming gain staging is correct, clicking is almost always caused by
a missed audio interrupt and the causes are either that the
application is too slow to respond to the driver or that the driver is
too slow to respond to the hardware due to some conflict.  Reinstalling
the OS should fix both, but won't indicate which of the two it was.

I occasionally get mysterious clicks from my older PCI sound card,
these seem to be solved by rebooting and running a "calibrate converter"
utility in the driver's control panel.  

Jeff