I’m having a problem in a couple of my projects where after a random period of time I will start getting very (LOUD) audio pops, scratches in my material with intermittent total distortion of the audio.
When the Pops occur the Performance and CPU meters are consistent at 50% but the master loudness meter will peak at max level. Strangest part is that I don’t have to have any of the content playing back when this happens. Simply having the project loaded will cause this to happen.
If I am playing the content it still occurs but at some point at times, the audio will just distort out totally and I have to quickly turn my gain all the way down to prevent damage to my speakers. I mean its really really distorted and LOUD.
The audio pops and scratches and sometimes even sound like high pitched tweeks as well. Since it happens when nothing is going on, it can’t be due to overloaded resources.
I’ve loaded other projects to see if it will happen but it doesn’t so I’m kinda baffled at this point. I initially suspected a hardware issue at first but since it only appears to happen when certain projects are loaded that kinda rules out hardware I think.
Anyone ever seen this issue before? I’m totally confused at this point. 
iMac 27
32GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1024 MB
3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
Cubase 10.0.20
Hi,
Could you try to increase your Audio Device Buffer Size, please?
Hi Martin, that was actually one of the first places I addressed. The buffer size is 2048 and the performance/cpu meter is well within an nominal range as well.
Could a corrupt project template or some other component of the project cause this type of issue? I’m thinking it has to be specific to this particular project. If it were occurring across multiple projects, I’d extend my troubleshooting to the hardware. I just don’t see anything indicative of that right now.
Hi,
If only one project is affected, it might be the project is corrupted.
Could you try to Back up Project and run this new project?
Tried backing the project up and running the new project… still no resolve
Turned off all connected hardware and ran the project using only the built-in audio… no resolve
Performed a reinstall of Cubase overwriting existing files… no resolve
Then while playing the project and (contending with the annoyance for a time) for this random pop and distortion issue, I decided to swap out the AVOX DUO plugin Auto-Tune - The Best Vocal Plug-Ins Available with another AVOX plugin and the pops, clicks and distortion just elevated to a whole other level with the issue being totally unbearable.
So I removed it and returned to the AVOX DUO plugin and the issue was still present but not as exaggerated. Suspecting the plugin was the culprit, I replaced it with the AVOX Harmony Engine EVO plugin and I haven’t experienced the distortion, pops or clicks since.
I’m going to monitor it some more on today but it “appears” that a couple of the AVOX plugins cause the problem. I have the AVOX 4 plugin Collection found here Auto-Tune - The Best Vocal Plug-Ins Available
so I’m not certain if there are others in that bundle that will cause the issue but so far, I know 2 of them definitely wreak havoc.
Seen many similar reports of this from users running the AVOX Antares Auto-Tune plugin v. 8.1 but nothing really for the ones I’m using. Really strange. 