Garbled audio but only on one deck

Jay McQueen

Still trying to figure this one out. While playing a gig recently with 2 tech 1200s and my Traktor Kontrol Z2, the right or B turntable was producing garbled audio part way through the tracks. Almost sounded like it was under water. It only happened on the right deck. I swapped needles, swapped timecode records and it only happened to the one deck. It got so bad at one point that I was having tracking issues and couldn't bring the tracks in on time because it kept skipping off the beginning of the song. It did it off and on for a couple hours and then stopped. I haven't been able to recreate the issue and that's troublesome because I can't afford to have it happen again.

Dj Davidoff

If you are on Windows 11 try going back to Windows 10, this worked for me

Jay McQueen

Thanks, Dj Davidoff. I am still on Windows 10.

Kubrak

What kind of CPU do you have? If Intel and 12th or 13th gen. you should use Win11 as Win10 CPU scheduler cannot handle big.little correctly.

Also, if you have one of those two CPU generations, you might also try to switch off efficient CPU cores to avoid situation that Win scheduler allocates Traktor task to little core......

Jay McQueen

Thanks for responding, Kubrak. I bought my Samsung laptop in 2012 or 13, so I'm pretty sure I'm waaaaaay before 12th or 13th gen Intel. I've got it pretty well optimized for traktor only. I have had problems previously with the blue screen of death but I managed to figure out that if I turn off the master limiter and channel autogain (I have the Kontrol Z2) that it does not crash. Those things in particular seem to add extra stress on the laptop. I'm watch my levels closely so I'm fine running that way.

Kubrak

OK, pretty old. I used to use i7 notebook from about the same era, till quite recently. It was so, so. One cannot expect wonders from a decade old notebook.....

Now I have 10th gen i5 (passively cooled "tablet"/2in1) and it runs just fine.

Jay McQueen

Yeah, I totally know I'm on borrowed time with this computer. It's just that it goes for long stretches working great and then out of the blue something weird will happen. I always like to know why so that I know how to prevent it or fix it quickly. What seemed to fix it in the middle of my set was shimming up the problematic deck to make it more level. But the reason I think that maybe that was just coincidence was I tried later at home to make the turntable as off-level as I could (to a ridiculous extent) and it kept working fine!