white noise, cpu spikes, glitches in MC8 (Solved)

[omtayslick]

Hi,
I have Mixcraft 8 Pro Studio. Sometimes when opening a song I will get loud white noise that pegs the meters to the top. and sends me scrambling for the off button on my monitors. Turning down the master fader has no effect on the noise volume level, and unless it stops on its own after a few seconds, closing Mixcraft is the only way to stop it. Also I sometimes get loud popping sounds when muting or unmuting certain tracks, or adding or deleting plug-ins.

Also, sometimes when first starting the program the first few seconds of audio will skip or be glitchy.

I also experience random skips and glitches during playback and recording.
After these incidents I often check the task manager and find that there has been a substantial cpu spike.

These problems are random with no apparent cause. I have two other DAWs installed on this machine and never have any of these problems with either of them. But Mixcraft is my favorite, and I would prefer to use it over the others.

Today I tried higher latency settings and removing the computer from the internet. The program ran fine for several hours, and then..... WHITE NOISE.

I also was going to try reinstalling Mixcraft, but the installer would not let me uninstall because it said Mixcraft was running even though I had closed the program first.

I am running up to date Windows 10, Mixcraft's latest build, on an off the shelf Dell I5 with 8gig RAM.

Anyone else ever experience anything like this? Help!

[JonInc]

If you have been able to run MC for hours without incident, then there is likely nothing wrong with the installation, so re-installing won't make a difference. (Still, for future reference, if you ever see get a message that the process is still running, start Task Manager *Hit control-alt-delete keys at the same time*, choose task manager, then select the problem process in the list and click the button at the bottom that says "End Task").

The problems you describe are often caused by buggy VST plugins. Can you narrow down what plugins you are using when these glitches happen?

Also, what is your audio interface/soundcard?

[omtayslick]

Interface is a Focusrite 18i20 1st generation.

The plug ins being used are nothing unusual and from vendors with a proven track record. Sound Toys, Plug in alliance, Tokyo Dawn Labs, etc. All of them work fine in Sonar and Studio One. But I will look into this angle further.

And perhaps I will also try disabling the firewall and windows defender.

Thanks for the reply, and any other suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks

[Acoustica Greg]

Hi,

The next time it happens, quit Mixcraft and send us your mixcraft-log.txt file.

To find the mixcraft-log file, highlight the following line and press Ctrl+C to copy it:

Code: Select all

%appdata%\Acoustica\Mixcraft\

Press the Windows Key+R to pop up the Run box in Windows. Click in the Run box and press Ctrl+V to paste in the line from above. Finally, click OK to go to the location of the mixcraft-log.txt file. Submit an Acoustica Support Request and attach the log file along with a brief description of the problem.

Greg

[JonInc]

The plug ins being used are nothing unusual and from vendors with a proven track record. Sound Toys, Plug in alliance, Tokyo Dawn Labs, etc. All of them work fine in Sonar and Studio One. But I will look into this angle further. ...

The VST spec (rules of coding) has many areas that are open to interpretation by DAW and plugin developers. So it happens all the time that a VST plugin works fine in one DAW, but misbehaves in another. Bottom line, if you see a pattern of the same plugin(s) causing the glitches, then it's worth troubleshooting further.

A couple more things to try...

Switch to a different USB2 port. (Avoid USB3 ports. In theory, they are backwards-compatible. In reality, not so much).

Run Resplendence's Latency Monitor to get a handle on what tasks are using up your resources.

Disabling firewall and antivirus is a good idea.

[omtayslick]

Thanks Greg and JonInc. I will follow up on these suggestions, and hopefully get on the road to solving this.

[omtayslick]

This problem has disappeared now that I have disabled all VST3 plug-ins and am using their VST2 and VST counterparts. No time or inclination on my part to sort through them all and see which ones might be the offenders. No real advantage to VST3 for my purposes anyway.

Thanks JonInc for pointing me toward vst's as a place to investigate. Then I saw the thread linked below and it all kind of clicked and made sense.

http://forums.acoustica.com/bbs/viewtop ... =4&t=23219