USB recording = random pops in recorded take?

I tried four different hard drives as I thought, early on, this was the issue. The internal 160GB drive (Speed: 1.5 Gigabit per system profiler) an external Fireware drive, and two WD USB 2.0 drives. All have the pops present regardless of which is used to record or cache takes too.

I'm going to do some more tinkering and data collection tonight so that I can send Cliff as specific info as I can.

This is on a MacBook Pro 2.16GHz w/2GB of RAM running OSX.5.8
 
when I first got my mac pro it came with the standard 2Gb ram...
all was ok until I went and got bfd2.. then I had all kinds of grief.. songs stuttering, loads of latency when recording.. it just went into a tailspin..
I popped another 4Gb of ram in there and everything suddenly started playing nice...
the big advantage I have though is the 4 internal hard drives...
one main one, another for logic's sample library, another for bfd2 and another for komplete 7
my audio records to the main drive so all my audio 'stuff' is spread across all 4 drives.. config-ing this way made quite a difference..
I know this don't help you guys that have single drives.. but I have heard of folk with mac books running their sample libraries from external firewire drives pretty well...

ahh... sorry for the digression....
anyways... back to the question...
are all mac book users, with logic struggling with the Axe's usb interface for audio????
if some are not.. what are they doing differently??
 
Well guys, I tinkered around more tonight. Here are my findings:

-The pops, while not showing in the waveform, are there somehow. Even when I take the raw wave and convert it into some other format with another program, the pops and clicks are still there.

-I used 4 different hard drives, with three different methods of connection, all garnered pops.

-I unplugged everything and turned off everything that wasn't Axe II or Reaper(or Audacity or GarbageBand, all tried individually) still have pops.

-I used both system output and Axe output, still get pops

-I plugged in POD X3(also via USB) and got no pops? Plugged Axe outs into POD(essentially using POD as interface...yuck) and while it sounded....well...odd...there were no pops. Line6 A/D conversion is....well...I don't need to go into that.

-All through out all of this, I monitored Reaper's performance. The disk write speed never exceeded 149B/s and CPU usage never went more than 5.9%(with the exception of right when I start recording I would get a 20%ish spike but there were no pops here)

-Sometimes, there is only a few pops, other times the take is unusable. No rhyme or reason that I could find point to either case.

-When I select to output via the built-in system, there is a latency there. It's not terrible but I can deff feel it and when I tried to play along with something, my timing was all crap.

The last bullet item I think is the heart of this thing, somewhere there is a latency or buffer issue. It isn't Reaper specific so I don't know if there is a setting in Reaper that can compensate for it. It seems to be something in the OSX system vs something in the II. Maybe the driver? I'm no 'puter tech. I'm going to compile a little more stuff before I send a note off to Cliff(if you are reading this, I'll send you and email soon, I don't want to waste your time so I'm trying to get as much detail as possible and will include clips) and probably won't get to that until the weekend.

For now, I'm jamming the heck out of my II but for recording I'm kind of dead in the water. I also going to try another computer as soon as I get access to one.

Ohh and did I mention that the HBE model makes my pictures on the wall shake....honestly I didn't mean to turn it up that loud...honest...
 
if the pod don't pop via usb then it's not looking like latency...
surely if one usb audio interface would pop then they all would???

are the signal levels you're sending down the Axe's usb very high or very bassy
could these pops be caused by occasional digital clips?

also, don't forget that the Axe usb has a sample rate of 48K
are you config'd to match that at the in your DAW..??
to be honest, if there was a mismatch I've no idea how it'd behave, if you'd just get nothing, or if you'd be hearing artefacts..
so I've no idea what it'd sound like
you still need to check this though
 
^what he said.

Also everything is set to 4800/24, everywhere it can be. It sounds like a digital clip but there is nothing on the waveform AND the pops are not associated with area of peak levels, they seem random.
 
Again, agreed.... Not associates with peaks and they appear at different times

Hope to find time later to try with the other hard drive.
 
clarky said:
if the pod don't pop via usb then it's not looking like latency...
surely if one usb audio interface would pop then they all would???

are the signal levels you're sending down the Axe's usb very high or very bassy
could these pops be caused by occasional digital clips?

also, don't forget that the Axe usb has a sample rate of 48K
are you config'd to match that at the in your DAW..??
to be honest, if there was a mismatch I've no idea how it'd behave, if you'd just get nothing, or if you'd be hearing artefacts..
so I've no idea what it'd sound like
you still need to check this though
Click to expand...

That is not correct. Each driver has its own buffer and/or latency settings. You can EASILY have one clicking and popping while another does not.
 
javajunkie said:
That is not correct. Each driver has its own buffer and/or latency settings. You can EASILY have one clicking and popping while another does not.
Click to expand...

ahhh... I see.. does that therefore imply that there is nothing wrong with the usb port on the mac and that the issue is created by the audio interface's driver / driver settings?
and so this is why it is possible to have a variety of different usb audio interfaces, some that play nice and some that don't?
what could be the reason then that the pod usb is fine on the mac and the axe is not?
is there something that can be user adjusted that will solve this or is it hard coded?
 
BadMelonFarmer said:
can you change the buffer settings on the Mac at the OS level?.... rather than in the app preferences?
Click to expand...

I don't know what you can adjust in that respect...
maybe you could look around in apps -> utilities -> audio midi thingy..
this is where you config the audio and midi mac wide
so you can maybe do a litle research in this area..
and also see what jj comes back with cos he's a lot more switched on than me at this stuff....
 
clarky said:
ahhh... I see.. does that therefore imply that there is nothing wrong with the usb port on the mac and that the issue is created by the audio interface's driver / driver settings?
and so this is why it is possible to have a variety of different usb audio interfaces, some that play nice and some that don't?
what could be the reason then that the pod usb is fine on the mac and the axe is not?
is there something that can be user adjusted that will solve this or is it hard coded?
Click to expand...

It doesn't use the same driver. There could be a lot of reasons.

On the Windows side of things w/ the recording app closed you can change the buffer settings. I don't have my mac plugged into the axe-fx right now but I will see if there is an equivalent tool on the mac.
 
Ok, restored to the original drive that came with my mac... Updated to 10.7.2

Still the same :-(

It has to be something with the axe-Fx II and or drivers as I noticed that I get CPU over loading on the Axe-FX II screen with a preset that is 91% before I start a DAW... As soon as I start a DAW it starts popping and crackling and giving me the overload message when I am not actually playing anything on the guitar or on the Mac... It was just scanning the plugins folder.

I tried a patch with a lot lower CPU and I don't get the overload warning, but I still get the popping and crackling when I try to monitor via the Axe-FX.

As stated before, if I monitor via the computer output I do not get an issue.

Don't know where to go from here.

Perhaps I will try my wife's older mac to see if I still get the same issue.

Cheers

Martin
 
I, too, am getting the dreaded pops and clicks running my Axe 2 into Logic. It's pretty depressing, actually. I desperately wanted to use this function, as it frees up space on my Focusrite and is latency-free. I have been following this thread as I'm actively interested in seeing what comes of it. I sure do hope we can figure out what is going on. If I don't get this fixed within a month or so I'm going to have to go through the interface, however, as I'm going to be starting production in just a little while. :cry
 
BadMelonFarmer said:
Ok, restored to the original drive that came with my mac... Updated to 10.7.2

Still the same :-(

It has to be something with the axe-Fx II and or drivers as I noticed that I get CPU over loading on the Axe-FX II screen with a preset that is 91% before I start a DAW... As soon as I start a DAW it starts popping and crackling and giving me the overload message when I am not actually playing anything on the guitar or on the Mac... It was just scanning the plugins folder.

I tried a patch with a lot lower CPU and I don't get the overload warning, but I still get the popping and crackling when I try to monitor via the Axe-FX.

As stated before, if I monitor via the computer output I do not get an issue.

Don't know where to go from here.

Perhaps I will try my wife's older mac to see if I still get the same issue.

Cheers

Martin
Click to expand...

Q - when you monitor via the Mac, does this mean that you are not sending the audio back up the USB to the Axe [for monitoriing]??

if so... and note that I'm certainly no expert here... could it be that the extra load on the USB [audio 'from the Axe' to record and audio 'to the Axe' to monitor] causes some sort of congestion??

when you send audio from the Axe to the DAW are you sending both the dry and wet signals together?
would it be possible to send the 'dry only' to the DAW, send the DAW 'output' [containing the entire mix of the song without the Axe] and monitor the Axe internally [just as you would as if you jacked your headphones straight in and played normally]?

do you have anything else happening on another USB port somewhere else [like Time Machine filling up an external hard drive for example] that could be consuming bandwidth on the USB circuit??? so are there 'non-essential USB things' you can disconnect whilst recording?

like I say, I'm not expert.. just a few logical guesses on my part..
 
Yeah, I'm having the same problems as this guy. I'm not sure if it's the old OS X bug that Cliff had mentioned, but it sounds the same way. I don't have a Sandy Bridge processor. I haven't set up an aggregate for my inputs. Could that be causing occasional popping? It doesn't sound at any fixed rate. It's just random, and annoying as hell.
 
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