Clipping Noises while Listening in Cubase 4

Hi All,

I’m new to this forum, so please forgive me if this topic has been covered before. If so, please point me in that direction because I didn’t find anything after searching.

I recorded some guitar tracks earlier today and started mixing them immediately and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Now, a couple hours later, when I open them up just to listen, I am hearing a distinct clipping noise on all of the tracks. Each track’s level is well within reason and is much lower than 0 db. No red in the clipping box, etc. Also, the clipping sound doesn’t seem to be consistent (it occurs whether the instrumentation is present or not and doesn’t always occur in the same place in the file every time).

I opened up some other files out of curiosity and it appears to be happening on some of those as well. One guitar track from an older project seems to have a digital blippy clipping going on too. Don’t quite know how to describe it.

Anyways, this is all new. First time I’ve ever heard this stuff. I’m using my built in audio as the output right now, and just listening through a pair of headphones. No other audio on my computer sounds like this, so I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the Cubase outputs.

Anybody ever experience this before?

How’d you fix it?

if it clips/crackles at randomly different positions, it sounds more like a word clock sync problem to me, have you checked your audio card settings?

or related to system performance, does your VST CPU performance bar hit 100% during these cracking sounds?