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

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Lokmer wrote:

> 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?

What version of Ardour are you using and can you describe your computer 
setup a bit (hardware, audio interface, OS/version, etc)?  How many tracks 
are you trying to record and play back at a time, and at what bitrate and 
sample rate?

Do you see any error messages from JACK or qjackctl (if you started JACK 
that way) about xruns or warnings about your disk(s) not being able to 
keep up with the amount of data you need to move?  If you're precording or 
playing back multiple tracks, does the popping/hissing go away at all if 
you run fewer simultaneous tracks?  Note that just muting a track won't 
reduce your I/O load - you need to temporarily disable the tracks you 
don't need to use at the time.

jms