Weird audio distortion/ garbage in DP

Spikey Horse · Post by **Spikey Horse** » Tue May 06, 2008 9:40 am

Looking for ideas on what could be causing this.

First symptom yesterday:

Project = sparse ie no more than 15 mono tracks and 5 MIDI tracks. No FX yet. Just K2 and X-gear.

- When bouncing 1 simple MIDI track to audio from K2 the playback buffers suddenly crept up from barely visible all the way into red in about 3-4 seconds, recording dropped out and DP froze for about 20 seconds. It kept 'sticking' everytime I hit play/rec although it always came round eventually (ie did not crash).

- The K2 audio was turned to nasty digital garbage just before dropping out.

I figured maybe my (sample) HD's were over heating - it was hot I have no A/C at the moment and mac had been running for hours - the FW drives were kind of 'hot' to the touch! ... so I switched everything off and left it.

I come back to (another project) later on and all seems fine again.

I go back today to this same project (a differently 'saved as' version of it- but saved from the bad one from yesterday) and start tracking some guitar..... in approx the same place in the sequence the guitar audio track does the exact same thing - buffers go mental, drops out of recording, garbage at the end- DP becomes 'sticky'.

Here's what the guitar looks like - All 3 pics have no vertical zooming/enlarging, ONLY horizontal zoom was used.

Pic 1 - looks like a normal guitar DI track.

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Pic 2 - The wiper is in same place here as pic 1 above. (only horizontally zoomed a little) - you can see the (LOUD!) garbage is now visible to right.

Pic 3 - This is zoomed in further with wiper now in the 'garbage zone'.

Can anyone recognize this kind of waveform. What is causing it when recording guitar AND bouncing from Kontakt - and only (it seems) in this one project at only (it seems) at one place in the sequence (timeline).

It's as baffled to me as it is annoying...

Any comments appreciated!

G5 d1.8
4GB
10.4.11
DP 6 (-0.87)
828 mk1

Don T · Post by **Don T** » Tue May 06, 2008 1:31 pm

Hello,
That waveform looks like the way A/D convertors reacted in the early years when the signal went over. The wave rises to max (all 1's) then starts over at zero. Looks like a math error.

Spikey Horse · Post by **Spikey Horse** » Tue May 06, 2008 2:20 pm

Don T wrote:Hello,
That waveform looks like the way A/D convertors reacted in the early years when the signal went over. The wave rises to max (all 1's) then starts over at zero. Looks like a math error.

Yes that looks very 'math' to me too, and the fact it happened on audio files being bounced from K2 (in a V-rack) as well as from my guitar (via 828) must mean it's something up with DP - as opposed to hardware like the 828.

-And in this one spot in this one sequence... crazy.... I've since copied bits of the conductor only over to a new chunk and rearranged the rest as well as started rerecording new audio and MIDI performances - it was only a sketch project anyway just to get the arrangement and timing down.... this seems to have stopped the garbage and makes DP run smoothly again.

- and it now has a much better structure and feel, so I'm kind of grateful to DP for making me redo it.

OMG you don't think DP was trying to get me to do that all along... was it passing judgment on my music....... number 5 is alive!