I’ve noticed some stuff that is direclty related to the crackling of songs.
This usuall happens when using ASIO on low latencies. The weirdest thing I stubled upon when opening old XM’s is that it happens even without any VST’s or VSTi’s. So it might not all have to do with audio processing process itself…
I can list some things I’ve found out:
1. There is quite strange phenomenon that it (the crackling) goes away if you start looping the pattern, but on song playback it is present. (Don’t know what it has got to do with but seems like something with the memory perhaps?)
2. Also it seems - though I’m not (totally) sure about this yet - that it is more present on songs that have more tracks. So this leads me to thinking it has something to do with renoise buffering something. Anyways, I have not tested this enough so that I could say wheter it is the note data or the amount of tracks or both of them in companion that produce the crackling.
3. The problem goes away if you switch to “Direct audio” (!!?!) and no crackles on sample based songs using either pattern loop or playing back continuously (with 5ms latency).
I kinda rationalized that using ASIO at 1ms should perform better than using directaudio at 5, and that’s why I wrote this topic so sorry in advance if there is no basis for these assumptions…
…the songs do not only cracle… they also slow down in BPM whenever this occurs.
I’m running a basic XM (or many of them and all of them behave the same) that have 32 tracks, not that too many samples but some 30-50. The speed is F01 / F02 = 1,5 and the filesizes are averagely from 3 to 7 megs.
On my behalf this makes it quite impossible to compose using ASIO - so I hope this could be adressed. (I just tested and the crackles can occur even with bigger buffersizes and coming to think of it just running samples should not knee down a 4600+ because these XM’s were made using a pentium 60 or something =) )
There was also one more thing I noticed during this (that I might help when fixing this), but it does not come into mind right now so I’ll try to remember it and post back later.
benJam: can you confirm that this behaviour occurs on Renoise 1.9 too? there have been taken precautions to reduce such problems in this latest version
thanx for the idea… I tried this sometime earlier (and did now again with the example XM) and sadly the Optimizer does not cure the crackling.
edit: but I haven’t tried to shut down the cooling options from bios (though cool&quiet is off my motherboard has something similar as an option)
I’ll check if that does anything and post back the results too… (though that is really weird because there are no crackles using Direct sound I’m wondering if it can be hardware-related at all)
I turned all the automatical “temperature controlling” of the motherboard OFF. I also tried alternate PCI slots for the Soundcard incase this has something to do with my PCI slots and the GPU. Also tried various settings in the BIOS and none of these had actually any effect on the crackling =/
Anyways… I’m personally happy to run renoise at a bit higher latencies but, this is what I noticed.
this makes the crackles go away
-Playback just the pattern instead of the song
-Switch to Direct sound instead of ASIO.
this deminishes the crackling:
-changing the view to mixer only.
So clearly this has got to do with the displaying of the song… Not sure if this is a Renoise thing or if it has something to do with my setup, so if someone could reproduce this with the XM provided above (using low latencies) it would clear a lot of stuff.
YES!
I’m experiencing the same problem but WITH DirectSound. I don’t think I have any ASIO support for my soundcard.
I have almost always had this problem in Renoise. But it’s starting to occur everywhere now, mostly noticable in media-related environments.
For instance when I play a song in .WAV format in WinAmp it crackles, but if I let it play a couple of times it’ll play correctly later. The same relation can be found in what you stated in the topicstart; the first time you play a pattern with a big arrangement it crackles but it’ll get all right if repeated enough.
I’m desperate!
Btw Bantai, I’ve downloaded RMClock and I wonder how to disable CPU Management.
I guess the AMD bugfix isn’t for me since I’m using Pentium.
I had issues like this many, many years ago, on a shitty computer. The more “white” I had on my screen, and if I was using the internet through a cheap ethernet card, and if I dragged a window, the more the sounds would crackle.
I’ll give you the pro-tip and save you the grief:
It has to do with radio frequencies, wireless, and the placement of poorly insulated electronics on your mother board which were causing interference with each other.
Moving the components from slot to slot helped.
It’s probably voodoo of your components poorly interacting together with radio frequencies and other weirdness being generated by them. Just a guess though.
029: Nope, not at all. Well, the looping of patterns worked once but not anymore. Check my other topic for updates concering my problem.
Conner_Bw: Thanks for your tip. I actually tried to open up the case before this evening so the CPU gets cooler, but without success. I’ll probably go back to your post sometime.
