Occasional playback noise with Ardour + Delta-66

Hello, my setup is a Dell Dimension 9150 with a dual-core 2.8GHz Pentium D, 2GB RAM, 160 GB SATA disk, and an M-Audio Delta-66 audio I/O card.

Software is: Jack 1.103, Ardour 2.0.2 (home-compiled version) on 64-bit SuSE 10.2.

In the simplest case, my problem manifests itself when playing back a single track. I don’t know the professional term for the kind of noise I’m hearing, but it’s like, perhaps, dropping grains of sand on a paper surface, superimposed on the audio.

I get no xruns, load is almost nil, nothing indicates overload.

Sometimes it helps to stop, then play again. At other times, I have to quit Ardour and start over.

I’ve seen this some 10 times over the span of a couple months; 9 of which was with Ardour, one with Sooperlooper.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

eskild.

Hmm, I don’t think it’s hardware. I tried pulling “everything” apart, but to no avail. It seems more like some sort of software thing since I can remove the problem (for a while) by stop/play or exit/relaunch.

Other suggestions?

Cheers,

eskild.

hi, I have had a problem like this before, but not on a dell machine. It took absolutely ages to figure it out. It ended up being my graphics card!!! yes, really. Whenever it had to render a waveform, it introduced clicks and crackles to the audio, presumably becuase it was improperly grounded or something of that ilk. Are you using an onboard graphics card? I’m not saying go out and buy a brand new one, just that really odd things can happen. Make sure you have the drivers properly installed for it as well.

weatherhead, that may definitely have something to do with it; good suggestion. I’ll try and dig in this direction.

Thanks,

eskild

Could be a hardware problem like a bad contact. Try unplugging and replugging the PCI card a few times (with the computer off, obviously) and do the same with the host cable and all the audio connectors.