Extremely Loud Sound Coming From No Where!

Hi, I’m new to Renoise, and have been using it for a couple of months now, and I’m new to trackers in general.

Occasionally, while I’m using Renoise, the program will emit an extremely loud noise that’s obnoxious and extremely startling. This often happens not as a reaction to anything that I’ve done in the program, but seems to occur on its own. If it is a reaction to something I’ve done, it’s an extremely delayed reaction, to the point that there is no way I can pinpoint its origin.

It’s happened three times total. One of them happened to be while I was listening to one of the demo songs that comes with Renoise (which would have nothing to do with me manipulating the program–I pressed play to listen to the song, and the horrible noise came abruptly half way through the song).

After the second time, I just figured that I was going to have to expect this to happen with the program, and that the “panic” button was for this kind of thing. On the third time it happened, I hit the panic button. The sound stopped, only to start again a couple seconds later.

It seems like the only thing that stops the sound is to close the program completely. This seems pretty ridiculous. What’s the diagnosis? What can I do to fix or avoid this.

Sounds like you have an open mic attached to your audiocard and you are experiencing feedback…
Or you have an option on your soundcard to record its internal mix and there may be some faulty hardware component that does not exclude feedback. (like Bantai suggested)

yeah, feedback was the first thing I thought about as well. Check your soundcard mixer settings.

I do a lot of live recording outside of Renoise with various other recording programs, and I have never experienced a problem like this. So I don’t think it’s a buggy soundcard.

I know what a sensitive mic hooked up to the computer producing feedback sounds like. It doesn’t sound like this. This is less of a squeal and more of a full-on sonic rape. The TVA has an instantaneous attack, whereas the sound of mic feedback is more gradual, if that makes any sense.

So, I’m almost positive that it has nothing to do with the soundcard because I use ACID, Vegas, and Sound Forge frequently and have never experienced a problem like this. However, if I’m missing something, and you think it still could be the soundcard, then stop me in my tracks.

Though, what is a “buggy VST such as TC works compressor”?

Rest assured, thousands of us use this program and do not get “sonically raped.”

According to your description the problem happened while you played a demo song, so it’s probably not a VST as there aren’t any in the demos.

Maybe adjust the audio settings? Change the latency? Change the drivers if you are on windows? What’s you hardware specs? What kind of soundcard? Intel? AMD? Dual core? Insert every other question here?

As conner said: If that happens with the demo songs as well this is a soundcard related problem. And of course this could be a Renoise problem, lets simply try to find out more about this…

You are using Renoise on Windows, right? WinXP or Vista?

Are you using ASIO or DirectSound? When using ASIO, try to use the same settings in Renoise that you use in the other audio apps. When using DirectSound try to play around with the audio settings, especially the SampleRate. Also try increasing the latency.

One other sort of squeel you can get by using the filter plugins or filter envelopes (moog filters) in the instrument editor.
This however can be corrected by changing either the cutoff or resonance value…

However when this problem is occuring with the demo-songs out of the box, it is highly doubtfull this part is a Renoise bug like Taktik said. You are the first one to report such problem.

Nicholas: Any news about this? Anything we could do to help?

Maybe some important information from my experience:
When loaded some MDA VST(i)'s like Bandisto and Distort, there is sometimes a loud squeek noise
when i load a song with them.
No big deal, i hit the panic button then, and put my headphones back on.
And at that point, it’s not Renoise’s fault, but the VST(i)'s i use.

It could be usefull to test the exact moment when this sound appears, like using samples, vst(i)'s, dx or asio… etc.