Cause of clicks and pops embedded in audio tracks?

[David Polich]

Anyone have experience with clicks and
pops being recorded on all audio tracks in
one particular project? And then opening
projects after that and recording in them
results in clicks and pops?

Allow me to explain...I opened up a project
that was started over a year ago to record a new
bass track. The existing audio was fine, I had
never had any issues with the project. The bass
player recorded his part direct. Played back his
track...intermittent spikes, clicks, and pops
throughout the entire track. I could see them
in the track waveform. Tried changing buffer
sizes, closed and saved, repaired permissions,
restarted, opened the project again, tried recording
another track...same thing. Clicks and pops throughout.
Could not record anything into the project anymore.

Decided to tackle another song, that up to now had
been problem-free. Now this new project had the
same issue..anything recorded into it had clicks
and pops. It was like I had a virus of some kind
that had carried over into the next project.

Did all the usual things again..closed and quit,
trashed prefs, repaired permissions, rebooted my
Mac, opened a different project that I absolutely
knew was fine, recorded into it..no clicks and pops.
So I guess I had "good" audio again.

I swapped out the FireWire cable connecting my
Apogee Duet, and today have had no issues..
I didnt bother to try recording into the corrupted
projects, for fear that I would start getting the
clicks and pops again.

If anybody has experienced this kind of thing
and found a solution, I would love to hear about it.
Thanks.

[Sean Kenny]

Sounds like a clocking master/slave issue to me .... at the time of recording


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[David Polich]

An update...I've narrowed the issue down to (I think) this - even if I imported into a brand new project the audio that was "good" was from a project with a lot of tracks with cicks and pops (and I couldn't record anything new into it without getting the clicks), as soon as I play back ANY of the imported tracks, the clicking and popping starts. It's like the imported audio contains "trojan horse"
bad code that imparts itself to the new project.

So I have ended up completely re-building these "infected" song projects from the ground up, using
the saved standard MIDI file as my template, and re-recording all the audio again. Sad, tedious, time-consuming, but I have not had the clicks and pops again.

So far.

[mhschmieder]

Dave, make sure you check the audio outside of DP, and even using your computer's built-in audio driver if possible, as a sanity check that this isn't a word clock issue, as indeed I have experienced the same thing when I have accidentally gotten into such a situation with word clock master.