Audio interface issues, (probably a beaten dead horse topic)

[mikethomasmusic]

I'm sure this topic is like beating a dead horse around here,but I'm still relatively new to computer audio,after years of using just outboard gear,so any help would be much appreciated. Here is my situation.


Any ideas or fix suggestions when getting frequent almost white noise sounding crackling and distorting?

For songwriter demos I'm using one of those cheap $159 two xlr-two 1/4 inch input ins, 2 channel audio usb interfaces with Logic pro on a late 2008 basic macbook. Not that it probably matters but,I sometimes switch between logic pro x and logic pro 9. Although, now that I'm getting more used to working with Logic X I'm switching between the two less and less.

I can understand this happening when I'm sometimes trying to record because you can experience things like performance,latency, and buffer size issues,but sometimes I will just have a web browser open listening to audio on youtube and out of no where the audio will randomly start to crackle and distort,sounding almost like white noise.

I first usually go into my audio settings to try and reset the usb audio interface. That almost never works so I have to unplug the device and then plug it back in. I would say when I do this this some of the times if I'm lucky it will return to playing clean audio,but a lot of the times it either still won't play audio at all until I actually restart/re-boot my computer,or it will start playing audio some what cleanly again,but with the exception of this weird trailing sort of high pitch hiss sound that will sometimes be at the tail end of say phrases someone is speaking in a video or parts to a song,not to mention of course audio/video being out of sync when it does this.

It can get frustrating having to reboot my computer every so often while I'm trying to record music let alone just watch something on youtube or something.

I don't have the resources right now to do any kind of system upgrades so any hints,advice or tricks to help keep these audio interface issues to a minimum would be much appreciated. Ideally in a perfect world that I someday hope to get to, I would like to have one mac dedicated just for normal everyday use things like: email,apps, and internet; and then of course another mac that is totally just dedicated to the writing and recording music. Until then I'm sure I'm not the first to have any sort of issues like this, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and welcomed please? Thank you.

[kslight]

Have you adjusted your buffer settings, updated drivers, are you recording to an external hard drive, have you closed and disabled all unnecessary programs and features (wifi especially), how much ram do you have, is this a new problem, what is the interface, are you bus powering it or wall powering it, have you tried a different interface or computer, have you tried a different cable, is it USB 1.0 or 2.0...

These are all troubleshooting steps and vital info it would be helpful to know that you have attempted already in order to avoid beating that dead horse.

[JWL]

Yeah, just make sure you have all the latest drivers installed. This sounds like sort of old hardware, so any compatibility issues should be pretty well documented & ironed out by now I would think.

Also, maybe it's just me, but I always use a dedicated machine for audio production. For me that means a windows 7 partition running my DAW only. When I want to surf the web I boot into Linux on another partition and do all my normal, everyday computer stuff from there.

[mikethomasmusic]

Have you adjusted your buffer settings, updated drivers, are you recording to an external hard drive, have you closed and disabled all unnecessary programs and features (wifi especially), how much ram do you have, is this a new problem, what is the interface, are you bus powering it or wall powering it, have you tried a different interface or computer, have you tried a different cable, is it USB 1.0 or 2.0...

These are all troubleshooting steps and vital info it would be helpful to know that you have attempted already in order to avoid beating that dead horse.

I consider myself to only have a slightly above average at best knowledge when it comes to computers,and I only not too long ago switched to a mac after pretty much being a Windows user for my entire life.

I can understand trying to keep most of my computer's energy so to speak focused on the DAW recording at hand by doing things like closing unnecessary programs, like you mentioned. Turning the WIFI off would be a noticeable impact? I never heard of doing that and its definitely not something that would have even crossed my mind to try,so thanks for that I will try that as well.


As far as more setups details go, I'm just using a stock later year model 2008 macbook,(silver/aluminum with the black keyboard. When I click the about my mac it says I have 2G memory,1067 MHz and DDR 3.

As for the interface,I'm using an inexpensive Tascam USB122MKII. It doesn't have a regular power supply so it has to be bus powered USB 2.0 not 3. I'm also running OSX Mavericks and the tascam firmware is up to date. There is also an external USB hard drive in the mix that sometimes I will record to,however sometimes I don't. Regardless if I use the MacBooks internal drive or the external I still get issues with the audio from time to time.

This might sound like a simple question but what buffer size would be recommended for someone like me to use maybe?

Thanks for everyone's help. I wish there was a product that was either software or hardware that just would allow you to record using DAW software without ever having to deal with any computer performance/latency issues.

I can remember when I first switched over years ago from analog to digital. Looking back at some of those first years using digital I owned a variety of standalone digital multi-track recorders. Everything from the early Roland VS 8 and 16 track machines to Korg d1600's as well as Alesis and tascam hard disc recorders. All of those types of units are essentially computer processors and I can't remember ever running into any of the same performance/latency issues that can occur using DAW software with computers. If I were to get a better interface I'm assuming even with super high end external DAW interface hardware you can still run into problems because performance has to do more with what your computer can handle than anything else?

I know they sell computers tailored toward recording music. But I always thought it would be cool if Apple or somebody made a musician specific computer altogether. Like,you could by a desktop computer that would already have ins and outs built into it with maybe some nice mic pre's built into the inputs as well. Almost like the old stand alone 8,16 and 24 track digital recorders,except with a monitor and computer keyboard and of course DAW software.

[kslight]

Turning off wifi can actually make a big difference on an older system. The best buffer setting is the lowest one that doesn't glitch out on you, in my experience...the important thing to note would be I what you can do to get rid of the issue, if a different buffer setting changes the problem.

It looks like you may be reaching the bottleneck of the performance level of your computer, especially since you have loaded it with modern OS and software...and or maybe your interface is going out. Did you have these issues before upgrading to mavericks? 2gb of memory is not very much for modern software and os, I'm surprised mavericks supports this configuration to be honest.

If it was me, and I wanted to get more use out of the same setup without spending money, you might try doing a clean install of an older Mac OS and such...that May or may not fix your problem but you may find the system itself to run more smoothly.