Crackles (not about saturation, CPU / buffer size, only in Cubase)

Hello everyone!

So I’ve recently recorded a rapper who brought his own instrumental track with him. Everything went well, but when I reopened the session to mix it I noticed some really annoying crackles. So here are a few things I noticed :

  • master is always below 0dB so it’s not about saturation
  • buffer size is at maximum and CPU is not saturating
  • crackles are at specific moments during the tracks, I mean it’s not randomly popping, it’s always for example at measure 37 time 3
  • crackles appeared later on both recorded tracks and on the mp3 instrumental track imported in the session, so it means it’s not about my hardware
  • the instrumental track is not crackling when I open the mp3 file in my windows player

Also, I tried to import a new copy of the mp3 instrumental track inside of the session to see if it would crackle or not and it says “impossible to import this format of file”. It never did it before and it doesn’t do it in a new empty session that I created later.

I tried switching USB port for my soundcard (NA Komplete audio 6), I downloaded the latest update of Cubase, changed nothing.

I recorded the tracks with Art pro mpa2 preamp + Art pro vla2 compressor and my Komplete Audio 6 soundcard.

Hi,

If you are on Windows, use LatencyMon utility, to test your system, please.