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Midi cracks and pops...I'm stumped!


lefrash
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I'm hoping someone might know the answer why this is happening cos I'm stumped and I can't find anything online specifically on this issue.

Quick background... got a 10 year old xp sp2 Pentium D with 2gb ram of with an audiophile 2496 sound card. It was sitting doing nothing for a couple of years but I've recently just cleaned it out and have it a fresh system restore. It runs unbelievably smooth. I've got reaper free trial at the moment which I used to use with no issues. I've tested the system capabilities and recorded 16 tracks of bass and guitar audio and using a load of free vst effects... runs absolutely brilliantly at 24bit 44.1 at 6ms latency .... barely any hiccups.... which is a major plus point! However it really begins to crackle and pop on midi synths... none of these seem to be pushing the cpu too much... it seems to be accented more if I hit the controller keyboard quickly... I've tried it with all the different asio configurations.. but same result. I should mention it also happens when I use the on-screen keyboard so I doubt it's the controller. no audio ins and outs are clipping

Any ideas of any settings within reaper (Or anywhere else) that might be causing this? Or could it simply be the pc is just not capable of midi synths? It doesn't have anything else on it.. not even antivirus.... I'm more curious than anything due to the really good performance on audio recording compared to midi!

I could record a wee bit of it helps!

Thanks in advance.
Xx

Edited by lefrash
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I think I recall reading that early USB incarnations were not recommended for transferring crucial real time data, MIDI or otherwise? Something about it interrupting the data flow to search for newly connected devices.
I don't know really... just throwing it out there.

Edited by Shambo
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could be to do with your latency, if you try turning the buffer up does it improve it?

usually, a fast computer can handle really low latencies, yours may not be able to keep up.

it could be your soundcard, i used to have an m-audio soundcard and the midi link would struggle if the computer was struggling.

i know thats a bit vague, but give your buffers a look and see if pushing them up improves them, will give you more latency, but give it a try.

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I think I'm more suprised as everything else in the computer is running really well, and the audio is recording really well at lowish buffer (256 giving 5ms latency) [size=4]Changing the buffer doesnt remove it. I've increased the buffer up to 1048 and the crackles are still there. It doesnt affect every single plugin, but the majority of them, - possibly the more bassy ones (?), but as i said, there's no clipping going on. It affects on the recorded output of the midi, aswell as 'live' takes through the usb controller. Thats why I dont think it will be to do with the actual controller. The CPU is not getting overloaded at all - to me, it just seems to be an issue with the way the midi is getting processed.... - i[/size]

[size=4]I'm being totally vague about this too! cheers for the replies though![/size]

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can only speak from my own past problems,
when ever i have had midi ( and audio to digi recording) snap crackle and pops its usualy been down to clock errors either midi, smpte, MTC, mmc or a combination error.
my system has to bo clocked right or i get that popping resulting is what i call static spikes in the recording is the only way to describe it, in the past iv had it down to a crap BNC connector (the middle pin being too thin to contact... Cheap EBAY BNC connectors! dont do it) that took a while ! ! ))
anyway...
hope this helps...
[url="http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/eradicating-pc-audio-clicks-pops"]http://www.soundonso...dio-clicks-pops[/url]

Edited by funkgod
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