Hello Everyone,
I’m having a problem with the latest release of ardour where every now and then I’ll hear little audio glitches during playback. The sound is a brief kind crackling noise. Sort of like the background noise from a record player. I don’t think this is an xrun because qjackctl doesn’t show any messages about xruns (nor does ardour, and I seem to recall that ardour normally marks xruns when they occur). At any rate, the sound is more subtle than I remember xruns being, thought the quality is kind-of similar.
And it occurs quite inconsistently. At first I figured I’d made some mistakes while editing my tracks (there’s a lot of cut/paste/duplicate work I’ve had to do with my project), but actually when you play a given time in a different region sometimes I hear a click or two and sometimes I don’t. In fact, I’ve just noticed that if I loop a certain region, then I’m more likely to hear the clicks then if I put the playhead in the location and do normal playback.
Ardour logs a few messages to console when I’m looping:
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 282 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 282 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 282 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 564 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 846 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 282 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 564 + 0
drop flushed event on the floor, time 0 to early for 846 + 0
which seems odd, but maybe it’s not relevant because the glitches will occasionally also occur during normal playback in which case there doesn’t seem to be anything logged to the console.
I suppose it’s possible that it’s a hardware issue, like a bad connector or bad cables, however, the glitches seem to effect certain audio tracks (there’s two audio tracks that I’ve done extensive copy/paste/duplicate editing on) and not others. They also seem to be present if I do a stem export of the tracks and/or route a track output to another track’s input and record in, which suggest to me that it’s not an issue with either my headphones or output jack. Since I suspect the problem might be related to me having so many overlapping regions, I tried doing a stem export and then finding sections of the playback where glitches occurred and then cover this up with a region from one of the original tracks. However, it seems that if I do this and then export again, I still pick up a couple new glitches.
I’m using an onboard soundcard, by the way:
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
This is driving me crazy; I’m going to try working with the tracks on another computer with a different sound card and see if that makes any difference. But if anybody has any idea what might be going on, please comment!
Thanks!