Multitrack Software "Stuttering"

[JonPorobil]

I use Adobe Audition 1.5, and aside from a few minor bugs, it's always been pretty good to me...

Until now.

I had some serious problems recording my "Walking the Border" because Audition kept "stuttering" as it recorded. The click track or backing tracks will jump backwards anywhere from half a second to about three seconds, but the recording will remain constant. So I'll adjust my playing to match what I hear, but in reality, I'm throwing myself way off the tempo. It's mind-shatteringly annoying.

I don't think it's a memory issue, because I'm running Audition on a fresh boot, and it's the only program open. It'll do it with any number of tracks, or even just the metronome. (Yeah, you wouldn't believe how many times I listened to the playback and wondered "Was I really that far off while I was playing?" before I figured out what was going on.) Adding more tracks seems to have no effect. I also can't force it to happen, nor can I predict when it will happen. There doesn't appear to be a pattern.

I have background mixing turned on, it's set to Highest Priority, and Mix Entire Track. These setting should ensure that the problem I'm having doesn't happen, and yet, it persists.

Give it to me straight, Songfight. Is my computer possessed?

[Hoblit]

This has happened to me and I don't know the answer for sure but I did successfully clear it up.

I just figured I was working the computer too hard so I:

1. Cut out some of my 'services' and set them to 'manual'.
2. De-fragged my hard drive. It makes it easier for the OS to write to it.
3. Moved stuff OFF of the hard drive. Your OS needs some space to work so if you are particularly low on space on the drive that it writes to, then move some stuff around.
4. Take off the effects on the tracks and mute the tracks you aren't using while you are recording. Add the effects later when you are mixing down.
5. Make sure your input levels are good and that the device feeding sound to your computer isn't overwhelming it. (Double check that its at LINE levels)

Barring the easy stuff above:

5. Pull out a memory stick one at a time keeping really good track of each move you make. It might be one bad memory stick.
6. If you have more than one hard drive, have your software write to the OTHER one(s) and see if that helps.

Thats all I have.

[ujnhunter]

hrmm, not really sure what is happening, but make sure your hard drives aren't making any funny grinding or clicking noises, possible hard drive failure is in the near future. always keep a safe backup of your files. hope it's not the problem, but it could theoretically lead to stuttering... ::shrug::

[JonPorobil]

Re: Hoblit,

I've got my internal hard drive separated into two partitions. Windows is installed to the smaller one, which is just under twenty gigs, and the rest, 45 gigs or so, is a FAT32 partition. This is somewhat irrelevant, however, because I was recording to my 80 gig external drive, which has 30 gigabytes free. I'll try defragmenting all the drives involved, just because that's sound computer practice anyway, but I seriously doubt it's a fragmentation or space issue. I'll let you know if it works, though. I hope I'm wrong.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Every strange issue that I've had with lagging, glitches, freezing, crashing, etc, have all been related to the central processing due to heavy VST plug ins and too many tracks.

This has been said before, but I'll repeat it because I think it's worth repeating:
After you find the FX, etc via VST or whatever your plug ins are called, export just that track as a wav file, then bring it back to your project as a new track, then turn off the original track and turn off all plug ins on the original track. Do not delete the original track because you may need it later. If you need to get the original track off the project to make room, just export it in it's original form with no VSTs, FX, etc, and put it in an easy to find file that you can use for other exported part for this project. It makes it easier to go back and delete the whole folder to clean up space on your HD after your song is done. Of course if you have endless storage space and you're an E-pack rat, then keep it for eternity.

[Billy's Little Trip]

This is somewhat irrelevant, however, because I was recording to my 80 gig external drive

Ah HA! That explains it right there. You have to record to the computer that your recording program is on. An external drive is great for storage, but all files, interface, etc need to be on the same computer as the music program.

edit: I should add that this has been my experience. As soon as I try traveling through USB ports and external drives while working on a project, all hell breaks loose. It might not be an issue for a super computer designed, set up and operated by Fluffy.

[Rabid Garfunkel]

I say this with all the love and respect in the world, BLT, but you're on crack. Same computer, different hard drive

Firewire, USB2, even SCSI, externals are great for the audio data writing.

Gots to scroll back through to see what bit depth he's recording at, and whether he's monitoring through the DAW or through hardware.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I say this with all the love and respect in the world, BLT, but you're on crack. Same computer, different hard drive

Firewire, USB2, even SCSI, externals are great for the audio data writing.

Gots to scroll back through to see what bit depth he's recording at, and whether he's monitoring through the DAW or not.

Well, I did edit my post to say in my experience and that a Fluffy super computer might not have this issue. I don't have USB2, but my FireBox is firewire, which is great.

But, if I put a project on one of my external HDs, and try to work from that drive, I experience what Jon mentioned with the half to 3 second issue.


EDIT: by the way Rabz, the only crack that I'm on is yours and I'm about ready to upload a wav file.

[king_arthur]

I don't record to a computer (for reasons exactly like this one - when I'm ready to work on a song, I want to fire up the recorder and lay down tracks, not fight with the other stuff on the computer), but from my experience at ASU doing video work - Generic, certainly TRY doing your actual work on the internal hard drive and see if that gets rid of the problem. Use the external drive for backing up the project after each session, but not to work off of. I had a firewire drive and just trying to do video capture onto the external drive would fail every time; capturing to the onboard drive and then transferring the video files to the external drive was the solution.

FWIW, I have a friend who was having all sorts of problems recording on his laptop, and it turned out it was the wireless internet that was killing him. Since he turned that off, he hasn't had any problems recording on the computer.

YMMV, but hope this helps,
Charles (KA)

[JonPorobil]

This has been said before, but I'll repeat it because I think it's worth repeating:
After you find the FX, etc via VST or whatever your plug ins are called, export just that track as a wav file, then bring it back to your project as a new track, then turn off the original track and turn off all plug ins on the original track. Do not delete the original track because you may need it later. If you need to get the original track off the project to make room, just export it in it's original form with no VSTs, FX, etc, and put it in an easy to find file that you can use for other exported part for this project. It makes it easier to go back and delete the whole folder to clean up space on your HD after your song is done. Of course if you have endless storage space and you're an E-pack rat, then keep it for eternity.

This is just the initial recording. There's no VSTs or other FX on the tracks yet. The only thing even close is that some instruments are split over two to four tracks, and I figured I would reduce the CPU's workload by mixing down to one track per instrument, but that had no effect on it whatsoever.

I don't record to a computer (for reasons exactly like this one - when I'm ready to work on a song, I want to fire up the recorder and lay down tracks, not fight with the other stuff on the computer), but from my experience at ASU doing video work - Generic, certainly TRY doing your actual work on the internal hard drive and see if that gets rid of the problem. Use the external drive for backing up the project after each session, but not to work off of. I had a firewire drive and just trying to do video capture onto the external drive would fail every time; capturing to the onboard drive and then transferring the video files to the external drive was the solution.

FWIW, I have a friend who was having all sorts of problems recording on his laptop, and it turned out it was the wireless internet that was killing him. Since he turned that off, he hasn't had any problems recording on the computer.

YMMV, but hope this helps,
Charles (KA)

I'll give this a try, but probably not today, since my recording is mostly done now, and this will require some serious hard drive feng shui. I'll let you know how it works out.

[fluffy]

BLT, why do you assume I have some sort of massive supercomputer rig or that I'm a decent sysadmin? I just have an old-ish PowerMac.

Also, I agree with Rabid - USB2/FireWire are just fine for recording. They're not as fast as SATA but they're certainly fast enough to handle several simultaneous high-quality audio streams. I'd suspect fragmentation as the culprit - even if you have a lot of free space, it could very well be extremely fragmented. For most computer use, fragmentation doesn't really matter, but for audio it's absolutely critical to keep it to a minimum. (Which is one of many reasons why I love Mac - it constantly defragments the drive in the background, so you don't have to worry about this crap.)

[Billy's Little Trip]

BLT, why do you assume I have some sort of massive supercomputer rig or that I'm a decent sysadmin? I just have an old-ish PowerMac.

Yeah, you're right. I guess it's one of those stereo typing type things where if you have your doctorate, you can look at the mole on my ass and tell me if it's cancer.

[Märk]

Being one of the few here who use Audition 1.5 on a semi-regular basis, I can attest to the infamous 'jitters'... they come up without warning, then never go away, no matter what you do (almost- I managed to solve the problem when I got it a few years ago, and, Jon, you're gonna hate me for this, but I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT I DID TO REMEDY IT)

Some things to try:
-(I'm assuming you're using Windows XP) Right click 'My Computer'>Properties>Advanced tab>Under 'Performance' section, click Settings. Advanced tab (again) make sure Processor Scheduling is set to Background Services.
-Defrag your disks (all of them)
-Go here- http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewCon ... &sliceId=2

[king_arthur]

This is just another wild guess, but check and see whether your soundcard "hardware acceleration" is turned on, and if it is, try turning it off. I put together a bunch of computers a while ago for people using the Rosetta Stone language learning program over the internet, and if H/W acceleration was turned on, the audio would stutter and drop out constantly. Turning it off fixed the problem.

One subtlety I noticed while figuring out this problem was that if I reinstalled my DVD player software, it would go in and turn H/W acceleration back on, and I had to turn it off again. So even if you think it's off, check it.

Again, just a wild guess, but it should be quick and easy to try...

Charles (KA)

[JonPorobil]

So I defragmented my external hard drive, which wasn't really bad, but whatever. I haven't yet defragmented my internal drive, but I'm not writing to it or playing back from it, so it *shouldn't* make a difference (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm going to defragment it this weekend anyway).

I deactivated my wireless card, which was only sensible since I don't have a wireless network here anyway.

I went into the "Performance" tab under My Computer's Advanced settings, and deactivated almost every little background process (who needs drop shadows for pop-ups, anyway?).

One or more of the three seems to have worked. I rerecorded my vocals yesterday and mixed the whole thing with little to no playback lag. I won't know for sure till I start a whole new project, but for now, things appear to be working. The only distressing part, for me, is that I never used to have to do any of that crap to get Audition to do its job, which indicates to me that there's some kind of system degradation going on, and eventually even these fixes won't be enough. But for now, I'm okay.

Thanks, guys!

[Billy's Little Trip]

Why haven't you tried the simplest thing that I mentioned? Record, mix, etc to your internal hard drive.

By the way,
#1. Is your music program on the main computer or the external hard drive?
#2. When you used to record with no problems, were you recording to an external or internal hard drive?

[fluffy]

You might want to try running a spyware detector, or even a virus scanner. I like ClamWin since it's really-free (not like AVG or whatever which is just sorta-free) and non-nagware and you can set it up to scan whenever you want.

[HeuristicsInc]

ya know, generic, when i went to sf live in atlanta last year my laptop was stuttering on playback until i deactivated the wireless. it doesn't normally do that, but there for some reason it was. so maybe that was it. didn't think of it earlier.
-bill

[Billy's Little Trip]

You might want to try running a spyware detector, or even a virus scanner. I like ClamWin since it's really-free (not like AVG or whatever which is just sorta-free) and non-nagware and you can set it up to scan whenever you want.

Thanks Fluf, I just downloaded clamwin. We shall see if it meets my approval.