snap crackel and POP!

[CDB Studios]

After doing alot of editing in protools, my audio files are poping like crazy! if I take some of the plugins off (waves for instance) the poping goes away. Sometimes it sounds like little clicks/pops and sometimes it sounds like a wierd gating effect is going on.

Anyone know what's going on?

Thanks,

-Zach

running: G4 quicksilver 2002 with protools TDM 5.1.3 (or is it 5.3.1, whatever); 1.5 gig of ram, d24 card, farm card and 2 farm II cards.

[joelkriske]

are they all authorized plugs? and are you currently working with digi approved compatible system?

[earl parameter]

sounds like your not cutting the waves at a zero-crossing. there should be a feature you can turn on around there somewhere. or just make sure you do a slight fade in and out of the edits. hold the curser in the top of the corner you just edited ( both sides ). and it should turn to a triangle or something and then drag it into the clip and let go. you should then see a line showing the slope.

maybe ? "shrug"

[joelkriske]

i'll second the notion posted above.

one question, is it at the edit points that you hear the pops?
if you have some bad edits, certain plugs, like compressors, limiters and reverbs will jump all over those tiny little clicks, making them as big as everything else in the mix.

try zooming way in on the waveform everywhere you hear a click, and, if there's an edit there, work on the fade/crossfade.
Also look for irregularities in the waveform itself, if you've already consolidated the region, you may need to pull out the original audio file and redo the edit, or else use the pencil tool to try and smooth out the waveform.

[thearnicasync]

If taking the plug-ins away makes it stop, then it's probably not a editing or zero crossing issue, althought it's a good point above that plug-ins often make things louder. It's more likely (or in some part, at least) a system performance issue.

I don't know how TDM works, but find away to increase the process (hardware playback) buffer as high as you can get it...usually 1024 samples.

kb

[joelkriske]

hey cdb
i think if you elaborate a bit on where the pops are happening, we all could help you much more...
or (hopefully)the problem's been solved!

[Professor]

Not likely to be a system performance issue unless he's running lots and lots of tracks with lots of plugs on all of them. That's the point of using a TDM system, the processing is "farmed" off to the PCI cards instead of bogging down the CPU which can be left to its intended task of making pretty graphics. Of course, if the plugs are running in the RTAS mode and not TDM then that could be the issue.
But I'd guess at the poor edit points and crossfade placement/shape as well. The 'gating' sound could be from fades happening across two tracks that are cut in a place that puts them out of phase. Oh and in PT, you select and area around a butt-splice edit and hit smiley + f (or 'open apple' or 'command' or whatever you call that goofy little 'icon formerly known as open apple' button to the left of the space bar) and that opens up the fades window.

-Jeremy

[thearnicasync]

thanks...i've never used tdm, and I forgot it isn't native...