cracking and popping with fast-track c400

[jittery]

Hello DSF...

Today i bought the M-Audio fast-track c400 as a replacement of my old crappy Lexicon Alpha, and i was very pleased with the experience untill cracking and popping sounds occured. I didnt exactly expect this, since my old Alpha really had no problems with popping & cracking in all of those 4 years that i've used it with FL Studio.
Now, i've done some searching on google on just the fast-track series vs fl-studio. Most of what i found was people dealing with similar stuff, but solving it by increasing the buffer-length.
Problem is that increasing the buffer length doesn't change anything... actually it seems as if the cracking and popping just occures more often. I also have the latest driver.

I run FL Studio 8 in Windows 7 64 bit on my bootcamp partition on a Macbook Pro (spring 2010)

I really hope that some of you tech-geeks can help me solve this

[cmgoodman1226]

Hello DSF...

Today i bought the M-Audio fast-track c400 as a replacement of my old crappy Lexicon Alpha, and i was very pleased with the experience untill cracking and popping sounds occured. I didnt exactly expect this, since my old Alpha really had no problems with popping & cracking in all of those 4 years that i've used it with FL Studio.
Now, i've done some searching on google on just the fast-track series vs fl-studio. Most of what i found was people dealing with similar stuff, but solving it by increasing the buffer-length.
Problem is that increasing the buffer length doesn't change anything... actually it seems as if the cracking and popping just occures more often. I also have the latest driver.

I run FL Studio 8 in Windows 7 64 bit on my bootcamp partition on a Macbook Pro (spring 2010)

I really hope that some of you tech-geeks can help me solve this

I have that same box but it seems wierd to me that you never got that crackle from your old box. I get that happening when I have too many vst's running in FL. it happens when I have about 250,000 or more kbs running on my cpu for FL, even though I have 3 gigs of ram. What I do is once I'm happy with a certain synth line, I export it out, re-import it as a wav file, and then click save new version, so I always have the old version if I need to go back and change the original sound or automation. Another quick fix that doesn't always completely work but helps a lot is clicking "tools", and then "macros", and then "smart disable for all plugins". I believe that makes it so that all plugins not being used aren't hogging up cpu, and it usually reduces the crackling, but the only surefire way for me to get rid of it is to export everything I do into wav, and then take out any plugins that aren't being used.

My workflow typically goes as follows, I open I project where I strictly work on basslines and such and all call that one "project whatever basslines" and then another where I'm only working on drums and call it "project whatever drums" and then another for leads etc. Then I'll export all these different parts as wavs into a "project whatever song arrangement" where I can work on cutting parts, getting the intro sorted out, etc. The point of all this is to segragate the different portions of the project so it doesn't get too cluttered with hundreds of different effects and instruments open with all different types of automation going on in the same project. And if I ever decide I want to tweak something I have already exported, I can always go back to that original project. It's tetious yes, but it's so much more smooth and fluid that way; and it helps in the long run being more organized like that.

[jittery]

Hello DSF...

Today i bought the M-Audio fast-track c400 as a replacement of my old crappy Lexicon Alpha, and i was very pleased with the experience untill cracking and popping sounds occured. I didnt exactly expect this, since my old Alpha really had no problems with popping & cracking in all of those 4 years that i've used it with FL Studio.
Now, i've done some searching on google on just the fast-track series vs fl-studio. Most of what i found was people dealing with similar stuff, but solving it by increasing the buffer-length.
Problem is that increasing the buffer length doesn't change anything... actually it seems as if the cracking and popping just occures more often. I also have the latest driver.

I run FL Studio 8 in Windows 7 64 bit on my bootcamp partition on a Macbook Pro (spring 2010)

I really hope that some of you tech-geeks can help me solve this

I have that same box but it seems wierd to me that you never got that crackle from your old box. I get that happening when I have too many vst's running in FL. it happens when I have about 250,000 or more kbs running on my cpu for FL, even though I have 3 gigs of ram. What I do is once I'm happy with a certain synth line, I export it out, re-import it as a wav file, and then click save new version, so I always have the old version if I need to go back and change the original sound or automation. Another quick fix that doesn't always completely work but helps a lot is clicking "tools", and then "macros", and then "smart disable for all plugins". I believe that makes it so that all plugins not being used aren't hogging up cpu, and it usually reduces the crackling, but the only surefire way for me to get rid of it is to export everything I do into wav, and then take out any plugins that aren't being used.

My workflow typically goes as follows, I open I project where I strictly work on basslines and such and all call that one "project whatever basslines" and then another where I'm only working on drums and call it "project whatever drums" and then another for leads etc. Then I'll export all these different parts as wavs into a "project whatever song arrangement" where I can work on cutting parts, getting the intro sorted out, etc. The point of all this is to segragate the different portions of the project so it doesn't get too cluttered with hundreds of different effects and instruments open with all different types of automation going on in the same project. And if I ever decide I want to tweak something I have already exported, I can always go back to that original project. It's tetious yes, but it's so much more smooth and fluid that way; and it helps in the long run being more organized like that.

Yeah, the fun thing is that my old audio interface never had problems running tons and tons of VSTs, effects, automation and 100000000 unused samples in the drum sequencer Your workflow actually sounds alot like what my workflow has become over the last year. I just find FL-studio to be a really pain in the ass when it comes to quick-bouncing tracks. FL really lacks a bounce-in-place option like the one in Logic! Good idea having chords & melodies and drum tracks sepperated in different projects I already do this to a certain extend, but mostly just when i have something i want to sketch down quick... I never knew about the "smart disable"-thing, sounds like it could improve performance But as it is right now, just having 3 vst's running at the same time makes it pop & crack I think i'm just gonna do a clean install of windows - usually does the trick!