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Audio Interference Problems with my DAW
I'm hoping that there are some knowledgeable members here who know their way around digital audio workstations, music production software, and hopefully are familiar with troubleshooting audio problems.
I'm running Win7 on a system with an AMD quad-core 3.2GHz processor, 8GB RAM, and terabytes of drive space. I built this system several years ago, and it has gone through a few upgrades since its inception, but one of the items it has always had is a M-Audio Delta 66 PCI sound card. Even though the card is over 10 years old, it is such a solid, good design, it is far from being obsolesced. Other components are also hardware based, rather than software, which is the current trend. But I have updated this system's software such that I lave multiple softsynths, effects, and emulators galore.
I have several pieces of music production software on my PC, the one I use most being Cakewalk's Sonar X2. Things have been working fine until about a week ago, when I noticed a pulse occurring on my system during recorded audio playback. The pulse would vary from 120 beats per minute to 160 beats per minute. Sometimes it will be one number, sometimes another -- it doesn't slide around between these two tempos. It interrupts the audio signal briefly during each pulse, such that there is a dropout of sound. The pulse is quick in duration, I'd estimate it to be somewhere around 10ms in length, but that's an approximate number, I have not tried to measure it.
I first noticed it when I had my Alesis iO2 digital audio interface hooked up to the system via USB. Initially I suspected the iO2. But I hooked it up to my laptop and the problem was not duplicated. My Delta 66 sound card has an OMNI box that is connected to the card with a 15-pin cable. The OMNI box actually amounts to a very full featured 4-channel mixer, and I have determined to my satisfaction that it isn't causing or contributing to the problem. Currently I'm running my guitar into 1 IN, which is pre-amped, and the 1 2 OUTs go to my monitor speakers.
Among the other pieces of music production software I have on this system is Fruity Loops (Producer edition) v10, Amplitube v3, MIDIGuitar beta 0.9.4, and Band in a Box 2014. This 120-160 bpm pulse also affects Amplitube and MIDIGuitar just as bad as Sonar. Fruity Loops still shows this pulse, but it isn't as pronounced. But when I record an audio signal in Band in a Box, there is not a single trace of this pulse occurring on the playback.
I was told about the diagnostic tool, DPC Latency Checker, so I d/l'd it, installed it, and ran it. Unfortunately it didn't show a trace of this problem when I ran the software, doing a test recording, even though the recording showed evidence of it. I am reasonably certain that it is something internal to my system that's causing this pulse and that it is not an external influence. But beyond that, I haven't a clue.
This is an extremely frustrating situation. I cannot get any work done with my system behaving this way. I will be borrowing my daughter's spare laptop, which has just as much horsepower as my DAW, and I will set it up in close proximity to my DAW to see if it might be environmental in origin.
I'll check back in here after I've either confirmed or eliminated an environmental cause as the problem. Thanks for any help or insight you may be able to provide.
Last edited by cooltouch; 14 Dec 2013 at 18:14.