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Topic: Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD (Read 3475 times) previous topic - next topic

Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD

On my Win NT W/s 4 sp 6a with SoundBlaster compatible card 1GHz CPU and 256MB RAM

I have 2 players
- NWC 1.70 web update 9
- Microsoft CD player Version 4

I have 2 recorders
- Creative Wave Studio 4.06
- Quartz Audio Master Freeware 4.6

I can record without problems using MS CD Player with either of the recorders
However, when I use NWC with either recorder I get this problem

- I start playing a song in NWC
- as I open either recorder all is still OK
- as soon as I start recording, some "pops" can be heard, sometimes sort of "in time" with the NWC song
- when I stop recording but keep either recorder open the pops continue for some time.
- as soon as I close either recorder the pops stop

I also exported both Type 0 and 1 midis and tried those Windows Media Player 6.4.07 and had the same problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Ed

Re: Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD

Reply #1 –
I don't have a solution for you, but since no-one has jumped in yet I thought I'd post an answer, even if it may not solve your difficulty.

Someone recently reported the same or similar problem on the newsgroup. The fault is not with your players or recorders, rather with the sound card itself which essentially renders the midi stream into a "wave" (analog sound). You didn't specify what kind of sound card you have, but I suspect it might be a SBLive! or similar wavetable card.

There are a number of possibilities. If you don't hear the clicking when playing the file, only when recording, it could be that you're actually hearing noise from your hard drive. If the sound card is a PCI card (i.e. not part of the mainboard) you might try moving it to a different slot. Or it could be that you're getting a bit of "stuttering" caused by slow hard drive response; be sure you have Ultra DMA or ATA100 enabled (assuming that your system is capable of it). Another possibility might be to try setting up a RAM drive, and recording to it instead of directly to the hard drive.

I don't think the other person with this trouble ever solved it directly. You might check to see that you've got the most current drivers for your sound device, failing that you might consider a program such as Audio Compositor which renders the midi file "virtually" (not necessarily in real time). I'm not sure if this will run under NT, however.

Hope this gives you something to work with.

Fred

Re: Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD

Reply #2 –
I think that the most likely answer is that the velocity of the notes is too loud, causes audiowave "peaks" where on a normal amp you get distortion, in MIDI land on computers you get popping. Essentially, the "fff" parts of a track, or the loudest or fullest in sound are likely to cause popping. You should try lowering the level of the dynamics, say from fff to ff or even to f if there are lots of staffs. This should decrease popping. This is a common problem with loud MIDI sections.

Re: Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD

Reply #3 –
Loudest is mf. I tried all staffs (staves?) down to MIDI volume 10 (from 127) but the same thing happened.

Re: Poor sound quality trying to record from NWC to CD

Reply #4 –
There have been some "issues" with crackles and pops on SB PCI 128 cards. Creative got itself in a bit of a pickle with this card as there are umpteen different versions of hardware and a few less than umpteen different drivers per operating system.

Creative runs a newsgroup for users. I lurked there for a while until I was happy with my PCI 128 running under WMe. Last time I looked in about 4 months ago, it seemed that drivers were available for SOME varieties of PCI 128 for WNT and W2K that didn't pop or crackle but the problem hadn't been sorted for all hardware versions. I admit I didn't pay too much attention as it was not my OS.

Perhaps a trawl through the Creative NG might at least help to identify if others have the same problem.

Stephen