Initial Renoise launch has poor audio quality but loading a previous file fixes it

I have been living with an issue for some time now, when I first launch Renoise the audio engine seems to glitch and any audio played is heavily crackled. It is fixed by loading almost any song I’ve previously worked with(which will have no glitch) then just create a new song from the file menu and it all works normally. I’ve tried to open multiple renoise instances to compare settings but they seem the same. I’ve also tried to create a default template but that will have the audio issues on load as well. What is also confusing is that the audio engine glitches will still happen on some files first launch(from a shortcut) but not others, again, it will just be fixed by reloading a file I know works then reloading that track.

Any ideas? It’s not a giant inconvenience as I’ve just gotten into the habit of loading renoise from a working file and creating a new instance from there but it’d still be sick to stop doing that.

Widows 10, Renoise 3.3

Are you using VSTs? Maybe Renoise is not the problem, maybe there’s an issue with one or more of your VSTs. I would check which VSTs you’re using in your songs and if you’re using the same VSTs in the songs making trouble. If yes it’s likely that there’s a VST problem. If no then I don’t have a clou.

Have you tried reinitializing the audio?

Preferences → Audio → Device Settings → Reinitialize Button

reinitialize

Reinitializing doesn’t help.

which os?
which audio driver/device?
which sample rate, bit rate, etc?
does this happen in any other daw/tracker?

Maybe you could try to save a clean project as template, so that renoise starts with this template.

1 Like

Windows 10/Scarlett 2i2(directsound)/44100

The issue rarely happens on Asio, but directsound is my preference when not concerned with latency.

Does not happen on other daws, nor did this always happen.

buffer size?

I have had many crackling issues with Direct Sound and a 1st gen Scarlett 2i4 on Windows 7. Things suddenly sounding like “glitchy slow motion”. Is that what you experience too, @Dip?

For what it is worth, and I’m not sure about this, but I think my issues might have been caused by the fact that I run Renoise at 48Khz. While other applications like Spotify or a web browser with Youtube tried to run at a different sample rate.

In my case changing the buffersize had no influence. And my other DAWs, Reaper and Sonar, were unaffected by this issue.

When I use that same 2i4 interface with Renoise on an ancient Linux machine it gives me no crackling problems.

It does sound similar. I generally run 5ms buffer but I did notice that at around 15ms the error starts to improve, however, the tracks that can be loaded to allow a project to work normally are at that same 5ms setting.

I messed around and attempted to close any program that might be trying to hijack sound devices to see if there was a confliction there but I couldn’t find anything. I thought you might have been onto something with the background applications because the other night I was trying to reproduce the issue and I was unable to which I found odd. When I relaunched Renoise later that night the glitch had come back so I feel like it’s certainly possible there is something else in the background causing it but it doesn’t add up that some files work fine on launch and others do not.

I tried removing any settings/installed renoise files and installing 3.3.2 and the problem persist.