Pops And Crackles On Logic 7, Pops and crackles heard through audio Options

[matt9b]

Hello,

I'm a music producer. I produce commercial pop, dance, and classical music. I purchased a MAC G5 for my work, for professional audio production.

When I'm trying to record, the audio through my speakers and headphones crackles/snaps/pops every few seconds. This 'popping' seems to be more 'there' when moving the mouse. The 'popping' only exists when I'm playing or recording audio.

This 'popping' is apparent in recorded mixes

This problem renders the entire machine useless for professional audio production work. I have read many forums on similar topics, and tried the following remedies, but to no effect:

1. Install CHUD tools, disabled 'nap' mode.
2. Installed new mouse drivers
3. Disabled font smoothing
4. Increased I/O buffer size

As a music producer who is new to the industry, I have saved and invested a lot in this machine. I'm very dissappointed that a fault exists which renders it useless for my work.

If anyone can help with this problem, I would be very grateful.

Many Thanks,

Matt


--
System specs:
Mac G5 dual 1.8Ghz
OSX 10.3.9
3Gb ram
160Gb HD
400Gb HD
Mbox
Logic 7.1 Pro

[dkimchee]

It sounds like digital noise caused by a conflict with an internal and external clock. I ran into the same problem between my keyboard (which uses an optical out) and the DIGI001. There could be a conflict somewhere between the Mbox and Logic, or some other outboard gear using digital outs. I can't really help more since I have a different setup. Contact Apple and Digidesign for more info. Don't give up yet!

[lancet]

plug in a set of speakers to your mac and try switching over to built-in audio and see if the issue remains.

if it does not ( and i suspect it won't ) it's an mbox/driver issue.

I had similar issues with m-audio drivers awhile back

[rickenbacker]

Could be your Mbox drivers. Could be your audio buffer in Logic is set too high (or rather low), so the system is choking - 512, 1024 are safe starting points. Could be that you have too much going on at once. Could be that the Mbox is only a USB device and you have a lot of data playing simultaneously, which is causing it to struggle on playback (FireWire devices are generally much more stable). Could be that you have several virtual instruments loaded up and playing live, which again is overloading your playback system.

I doubt there's anything wrong with your Mac or probably even Logic. The finger of suspicion does point rather firmly in the direction of the Mbox. Try the built-in audio tip lancet recommends and see if that helps. Should the Mbox even be working with Logic? I thought you needed to run ProTools software with Digi hardware.

Also, 10.3.9 was a bad update. 10.3.8 was OK - a lot of people who went to .9 almost immediately went to 10.4 aka Tiger to get the heck away from it. 10.4.2 is now pretty stable for music. I had an OS-update-causing-noise issue back in the 10.2.x days and either going forwards or backwards solved it for me.

Let us know how you get on.