clicks and pops

[Last Alternative]

I upgraded my SSD the other day and now have my computer back to normal.... other than this issue which just now started when I opened Reason. I've been listening to music, watching movies, Youtube over the weekend with no problem. Now all the sudden here it is. I have the Focusrite Scarlett 2i4.
Now it's happening with all audio so I opened Reason again and tried ASIO4ALL - same thing. Tried every buffer size - same thing. Did some research and got confused.
How does this just happen out of the blue?

There's the Focusrite USB 2.0 audio driver with buffer length settings from 1-10ms. I never understood what to do with that.

[Djstarski]

I had the same problem over the weekend , but it only happened when reason was open . The problem was fixed when i turned the Ableton link off .

[chrischrischris]

I upgraded my SSD the other day and now have my computer back to normal.... other than this issue which just now started when I opened Reason. I've been listening to music, watching movies, Youtube over the weekend with no problem. Now all the sudden here it is. I have the Focusrite Scarlett 2i4.
Now it's happening with all audio so I opened Reason again and tried ASIO4ALL - same thing. Tried every buffer size - same thing. Did some research and got confused.
How does this just happen out of the blue?

There's the Focusrite USB 2.0 audio driver with buffer length settings from 1-10ms. I never understood what to do with that.

I have been getting Clicks And Pops too since The Upgrade to 9.1 but this has coincided with Me buying A Numark Orbit (Wireless Controller) so I have put it down to that but it does seem to still happen when I switch off Ableton Link and connect The Orbit by USB.

Chris

[Ostermilk]

I'm assuming a Windows PC here as you mentioned ASIO4All. There are numerous things that coulc cause these symptoms to start happening suddenly, updates, driver corruption, new software being installed, ad. infinitum.

The popular choices when this occurs is to make sure your device drivers are all up to date and working, uninstall and re-install if necessary, your chosen Windows poewer plan can make a big difference, as can tasks running in the background. (Windows Search and indexing is a good candidate to turn off). Network setups, USB Devices and Virus checkers are also common culprits to look out for as are System monitoring tools that come with some systems and motherboards e.g. ASUS suite which installs some pretty manky low level drivers in order to do it's stuff. Those kinds of tools might be great for gamers to help them thrash the last ounce of power out of their machines whilst they watch all the dials and knobs going round but they are the bane of a well-mannered Audio system.

This tool can help troubleshoot stuff that might be interfering with the audio stream. Don't confuse this with a latency checker which tells the time it takes for an audio signal to complete it's journey, this tool checks how long your machine take to process all the Deferred Procedure Calls that are going on in the background.

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Read the instructions as to how and why you'd use it and it can help greatly in diagnosing this kind of behaviour and what may be causing it.

[SonicDreamer]

I found that the mixer and rack animations in Reason chows up a lot of CPU, at least on my old second gen i7 - and causes clicks and pops in busy songs, and even the "Computer to slow" message (try scrolling the mixer or rack windows up and down while the song is playing). So, I turned off Hyper Threading in the BIOS: Reason now uses the logical (instead of virtual) CPU cores and on those problematic songs I don't get any click's and pops at all when scrolling the mixer / rack. Yes the CPU count in task manager now shows 1/2 the number of cores than before (which is the real count), but it works much more efficient. Reason does not use Hyper Threading optimally.
Eben

[jengstrom]

I would also recommend a proper measurement with LatencyMon, taken while you are repeating the known scenario that makes Reason click and pop the way you report. Just remember that the clicks and pops are probably much worse while measuring, and that's fine.

The Focusrite Scarlett USB devices have a good ASIO driver and don't benefit at all from ASIO4ALL. The buffer size slider in the driver ASIO panel just sets the size of the two buffer sizes selectable through ASIO using the slider in Reason -> Preferences -> Audio.

@SonicDreamer: Actually virtual cores and logical cores are the same thing; the design that denotes a single physical core (in a processor that supports HyperThreading), as two sort-of cores in the OS.

The important thing to remember about HyperThreading is that two threads (parallel tasks) tethered to each of the two logical cores for the same physical core in a HT processor, will not run freely in parallel for long - either one of the threads will spend most of its time waiting for available computation units in the physical core, or both of them will spend about equal amounts of time waiting for that.

This is why Reason does not use HT by default for realtime audio rendering. The finishing time for two given short parallel tasks (such as DSP rendering) would be unpredictable and vary a lot for pairs that end up tethered to the two logical cores of a single physical core.

Another thing to remember is the maximum efficiency of HyperThreading, when the two virtual/logical cores for the same single physical core are both showing 100% load in Task Manager / Activity Monitor, the physical core can manage to perform a maximum of close to 130% of the effective CPU cycles it would have done if it didn't have hyperthreading/virtual/logical cores (a 30% net increase). It's usually much less than a 30% net increase.

[jonheal]

Jengstrom,

I am using a fairly low power PC, a Quad Core 2 Duo. Obviously, I run out of CPU cycles from time to time. Is there any harm in upping the max CPU setting in Reason from the default 80% to 95%?

[jengstrom]

@jonheal: That affects two things:

1. The maximum load Reason can put on the CPU (through the OS) for urgent, high-priority work. It can get laggy and hangy at some point.
2. How close to the (only approximately known) audio driver deadline Reason will go before telling you your computer is too slow. (I.e. Reason uses longer time to calculate audio than the length of the calculated audio for at least a while.)

[nicmac303]

Hi all, I know this is an old thread but it's one of the first that comes up in a search. My fix might help someone...

I had a similar problem, PC was running Reason 10 perfectly until I reinstalled Windows, then Reason was giving horrible clicks & pops on a previously undemanding tune with just 2 VST instruments playing.
I noticed that Task Manager (the Performance tab) was showing my i5-8600 CPU was only running around 1.5GHz speed. Whenever it perked up to 3GHz or 4GHz the crackles & pops would disappear.

So I went into Advanced Power Settings and changed Processor Power Management -> Minimum Processor State from the default 5% to 100%.
Now Task Manager shows at least 3GHz CPU speed at all times and the crackles/pops are gone.

I also tried fiddling with some settings in the BIOS to ensure a permanent 4GHz speed but my cheap motherboard might melt with the extra power/heat, so I put them back to default.
Hope this helps.

[Nani]

Hi all, I know this is an old thread but it's one of the first that comes up in a search. My fix might help someone...

I had a similar problem, PC was running Reason 10 perfectly until I reinstalled Windows, then Reason was giving horrible clicks & pops on a previously undemanding tune with just 2 VST instruments playing.
I noticed that Task Manager (the Performance tab) was showing my i5-8600 CPU was only running around 1.5GHz speed. Whenever it perked up to 3GHz or 4GHz the crackles & pops would disappear.

So I went into Advanced Power Settings and changed Processor Power Management -> Minimum Processor State from the default 5% to 100%.
Now Task Manager shows at least 3GHz CPU speed at all times and the crackles/pops are gone.

I also tried fiddling with some settings in the BIOS to ensure a permanent 4GHz speed but my cheap motherboard might melt with the extra power/heat, so I put them back to default.
Hope this helps.

I have the same problem with the clicks and pops, I'm going to check my windows 10 power plan, but I remember it is at default, so maybe I need to change to high performance and see how it goes.

[PhillipOrdonez]

For those having issues and who find this post: is worth mentioning that if you are on a laptop, you should be plugged in at all times when working with stuff that requires a lot of processing power.

[djs]

Change to high performance, increase buffer size to 256 or 512, and the sample rate to 44100.