Digital click-pop all tracks?

[m_gant]

Would a digital error such as a click appear on all recorded tracks?

I was working on something with 4 tracks being recorded simultaneous, and there appears to be some clicking just on vocal track.....or it is sticky mouth noise.

[dj_who]

i've had clicks come up on some tracks for no reason.

usually what i do is disable all the plugins on that track or on the buss and see if it goes away. if its a plugin, i'll just delete it and replace it with something else.

if it doesn't go away, then what i do is put a declicker in the track. i have no idea why this happens but its annoying.

[m_gant]

Oops- I guess I wasn't clear. I am talking about tracking only. No plugs are involved. So, would a digital click appear across all tracks being recorded at the same time, or will they appear on random tracks sometimes??

[MarkRB]

Check you are clocking correctly. Incorrect sample rates and Clocking errors will make nasty random clicking noises amongst other things.

[hackenslash]

I would suggest that you need to raise your hardware audio buffers a smidge. Recording more tracks simultaneously requires higher use of system resources, so your buffers are probably too small to cope.

[waltermusik]

m_grant,

since I mostly record 1 track at a time, I can not claim to have any practical experience. Anyway, I can think of following scenarios:

1. The audio stream comes in over 1 cable (e.g. via SPDIF from a stereo AD, or from a multi channel USB interface): In this case, the bits are serialized before they are buffered to be picked up by the CPU, so I would not expect synchronous clicks on both channels.
Edit: Depends on the implementation of the serialization. If they take 1 sample per channel at a time and the buffer underruns, there may be simultaneous clicks just as well.
2. The audio stream comes from mutually independent sound devices, extremely thinking 4 mono soundcards. Then, the buffers work mutually independent but are usually of the same size (common latency for all audio interfaces). So both simultaneous and non-simultaneous clicks may happen. For example, at a very short peak of CPU (or PCI) load, one interface's buffer may underrun but the CPU may catch up until it reads the next buffer, meaning the next channel would record just fine.

Most real life implementations of multi channel audio interfaces are a mixture of the 2 above, so I tend to generally state that a one channel only digital error is possible.

Please do a practical test (record simultaneously at all inputs with max sample rate and min latency) and let us know.

Cheers, Thomas