[Drew]

Ok, so I've got my M-Audio Firewire 410 up and running, and first impressions are this thing is damned cool, and I'm just stupidly excited that I finally have a recording setup that does a fairly good job getting the sound of my amp from the amp to someone else's stereo.

That said... I'm getting this strange clicking noise when I record through it. It doesn't do it when there's no signal or a very quiet signal, but when there's a medium signal or a hot signal, it happens.

My first thought was i was clipping, but even going in at -12 to -18, it was still happening. So, scratch that. Next, I figured maybe it was a sampling problem, either that the M-Audio was sampling at a different rate (it defaulted to 44.1) than Sonar (I've got it at 96), or that it was sampling at a faster rate than the hardware could keep up. But, the interface picked up the project default of 96 when I booted up Sonar, so they were in sync, and when i created a new project at 44.1, they remained synced but the problem didn't go away.

So, barring some sort of internal clipping (I'll research that at a moment), I'm kinda at a loss. the only thing I can think is I'm recording through the M-Audio interface but playing back through my Soundblaster Audigy Z (I need to pick up an adaptor so I can take the two 1/4" mono outputs I'll be using and feed it into the stereo 1/8" line for my speakers), but I doubt that would be the issue...

Attached is a clip of what I'm hearing, drums and two guitars, left and right. Save it to your desktop and rename it from .doc to .mp3, since I couldn't upload a mp3 directly, and let me know if you have any ideas... thanks guys!

-D

[Leon]

hmm, i have no idea. good to hear that you're recording again though!

[Drew]

haha, thanks.

As an aside, this clip is damned close to my ideal rhythm tone - if I could just clear up that clicking, I'd be ecstatic.

[keithb]

Sounds like the usual audio dropouts - make sure you've done most of the stuff at musicxp.net, that your drivers are up to date, etc.

[jaydik]

I had the same problem with my M-box when I first got it, turned out that I needed to update my Windows Xp

[Drew]

musicxp.net = awesome. I just set up a second "general use" profile, and am in the middle of paring down my main profile for a recording one - there's even a bass for a profile icon, lol.

I'll look into updating XP, but this computer's only a few weeks old, so it should be fairly recent...

[Drew]

opened some of the tracks and zoomed in really close on them - yep, they're lots of little dropouts. It's still happeneing after I set up a different user profile for best possible performance. I've only got 512 mb of RAM at the moment, but I figured that'd be enough to get at least 7 or 8 tracks going together to demo ideas, as the 410 only requres 128 to run, so i was going to put off buying more ram for a little while... I'm guessing that might have to happen now?

[Chris]

Told ya. With Sonar, memory is king.

[Drew]

Originally Posted by Chris

Told ya. With Sonar, memory is king.

*rolls eyes*

Yeah, yeah, yeah... i'm a fuckin' idiot for not listening. My roommate is still hotter than yours.

Eh, I'll give you a call after I order some more RAM, and float you a few beers if you'll stick the stuff in there... any limits to how many sticks can go into a computer?

[BCrowell]

What have you set the record/playback buffer to? Sounds like it's set to low. I usually have 256 sample buffer set up, and a max of 512. More buffer will save you from dropouts, but adds some delay.