cracks and pops

insideout

Hey Guys,
As you'll be able to tell, I'm new to recording.
I've been up and down the dial on my input/output settings. If you listen to this, there are several crackles and pops. When I lower the settings in console I get terrible hiss and noise - when I raise them, I get feedback from the computer speakers. If this is enough info to give me some suggestions, I'm all ears. If not, let me know if you think it's worth putting more time into this tune. 8)
Thanks!

http://www.digitech.com/soundcomm/guitar_view_music.asp?productid=215&music_id=2163

jscott013

Just a quick note to let you know it sounds fine here. No cracks or pops. I liked it in fact and look forward to hearing the finished tune.

I think the guitar solo and guitar 2 are stepping on each other a little, that can be corrected in the mixdown.

Cool tune, good sound.

iliace

No significant noises to speak of. Perhaps you're noticing some intermittent clipping, if so there's nothing [time-efficient] you can do about that, short of rerecording the part.

The way to see what the problem is: go to the waveform at the time where the clip occurs. If the top of the wave appears as though it has been \"chopped off\" (i.e. the peak is flat and not peak-like), you clipped somewhere during recording or subsequent processing.

If you see nothing on the waveform, the crackling might be due to glitches at mixdown. Load the WAV file back into PTP (or whatever you're using) and look for similar clipping situations. Seeing what the glitch looks like on the wave form is sometimes the best indicator as to what exactly you're hearing.

Are you using a feature such as \"Fast Bounce\", or mixing down in real time (e.g. MDM->Master)?

insideout

jscott,
Thanks for the feedback and encouragment. I agree, the mix needs help.

iliace,
Also, thank you very much for the feedback. I understand everything you said except the fast bounce/real time mix statement. Unless it's easy for you to explain, I have to do some research to know how to answer that. I just went into console, set the sliders to where it sounded good during playback, and then exported to mp3. I did this 6 times (hense the 6 in the song name) - when I had it too low, the mp3 was just hiss and feedback if I turned the speakers up too loud - as I progressively moved the sliders up, I started to get audible playback of the mp3, but I hear cracks and pops on my end. I'll look at the wave form for sure.

Thanks!

iliace

If you're mixing on your computer using PTP, there's an option for \"Fast Bounce\". Real-time mixing would mean you have a multi-track tape (or several) playing back and recording to a single stereo pair.

RAM would primarily be an issue if you're not using Fast Bounce. Exporting a WAV file will use system resources as appropriate, and should wait for enough of them to become available to do a proper job. Your system sounds like it's up to the specs for a quality mixdown.

What you should do is play back the entire track and watch the peaks, especially on buses. If any go to 0.0 and turn RED, something clipped - finish for the playback, and then turn down each bus by the amount that it clipped (highest level is captured under default settings). If you have a compression plugin, you can use a combination of that and turning down.