[Ardour-Users] New ardour user - two questions and one bug to report

[Lokmer]

Hey all -

I'm new with using Ardour, but on the whole have found it intuitive and 
comprehensible since I come from a background of doing live sound 
reinforcement work.  I've run into a couple snags that I'm hoping you 
guys would be kind enough to help me with.

Problem 1: Popping and hissing.
Working on my laptop, anytime I playback in Ardour it's accompanied by 
the most horrendus popping, hissing, and other static sounds.  It's not 
clipping, and it seems pretty uniform across the audio spectrum (i.e. it 
happens regardless of whether the voice playing back is high or low, or 
EQ'd high or low).  This makes it really difficult to do proper EQ 
passes to minimize room tone, as well as listen to make sure precision 
edits are actually as precise as they should be.  Has anyone run into 
this?  Is there a fix - or, indeed, is there a good way to diagnose what 
exactly is going on so a fix may be arrived at?

Problem 2: I can't seem to output a finished project.  Whether 
outputting a session or a range, and whether "master outs" or the track 
outs are checked, I get the proper "exporting" dialogue, and an audio 
file of the proper length, but the file is empty.  I've tried rerouting 
tracks, sending them through a fresh bus, everything I can think of, but 
the end result is (so far) always silence.

Bug (or, potential bug):  When adjusting fader gain on the automation 
for a track, if I zero out a fader on a single track it mutes all tracks 
(whether they're in the same edit group or not, the speakers go 
silent).  If I back it off just a hair so that it's not zeroed out, the 
other tracks play through at their proper volume.


Any help here would be hot.  Thanks!
-Dan