Playback Crackles and Noises - tried different fixes

Hi there,
the symptoms of my problem are probably nothing new, yet the root of it might be:
Whenever I turn on playback of an arrangement in Cubase, arbitrary noises and crackles
appear PLUS quite often some wav-files in the arrangement are simply not played
and left out. One time the overhead-mic track are not playing, then the snare etc.,
arbitray as well. The noises are not on the wav-files themselves, the noises appear on different
spots every time. This problem only occurs during playback in Cubase; when I play music
or any other media in Windows explorer the sound is fine. The problem occurs on any
project I open, no matter how big the arrangement or files are.

Here’s what I tried so far, all without success/no solution of the problem:

  • Increasing buffer size in ASIO to maximum.
  • Disabling CPU core parking.
  • Checking the clock source. It’s internal (Big Ben).
  • Tried defragging the harddrives.
  • Deleted the .peak-files in the images folder of the project.
  • Turned off any VST-Plugins.
  • While Cubase is open there are no other unnecessary programs running that could affect
    the PC’s performance.

I HAVE ONE CLUE what it could be though, but I still don’t know how or why:
Everything worked perfectly and I didn’t have any problems with my current system configuration,
until I moved the projects over to a new harddrive and used the new harddrive as source.
But I dont know how this could cause these noises,since this new harddrive is a SATA600
connected to a USB 3.0 port with a writing speed up to 60 MB/s.

Here’s my system:

  • Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
  • Intel Quad-Core CPU
  • 8 GB of Ram
  • For mixing at home I use the soundcard of my mainboard.
  • Cubase 5
  • Cubase in installed on C:, the wav-files and projects are on a different harddrive.


    Someone please help me! Thanks.

What you describe should work. Maybe you can copy or create a new project and store it temporarily on the C drive to test it out.

Also, you didn’t mention what audio driver you are using. Have you tried downloading the free “ASIO4ALL” driver and using that one? Who knows… you might get lucky. :wink:

http://www.asio4all.com/

Regards :sunglasses:

I followed your suggestion and copied a project and its wav-files over to C:. There are no playback problems now,
so it must have something to do with the other harddrive. Still I don’t understand why, it’s a fast SATA 600 harddrive connected to a USB 3.0 port and it’s able to copy files with about 60 MB/sec. Why does it have these problems during playback in Cubase?

By the way, I’m running ASIO4ALL 2.13.

Next thing I tried was copying a project to one of my other external harddrives in order to see if the crackles only appear when using this new external harddrive. Same problem. All my external harddrives are fast USB 3.0/ SATA drives.
Right now it only works without these noises when I have the project and audio files stored on my internal drive (C:).

Every time I try it with any of my external drives it says “disc cache overload” in the transport window.

The funny thing is, before I used this new external harddrive, I stored my projects and audio on an external harddrive as well, and it worked perfectly.