crackling glitchy fizzy sounds in una corda

isaname

apologies if i'm making some newbie error

i'm getting crackling glitchy fizzy sounds in una corda on my wav mixdowns. quite quiet but still distinctly noticeable at a good volume with half decent earphones. every 10 seconds or so.

solo piano, one instance of kontakt 7 player, brand new macbook air M2, Reaper, AUi or VST3i both glitching, 360subscription, i currently have no usb interface (could that be the issue? i read online that it's not used in rendering so i figured i don't need one for this project, though i know it would help with monitoring playback)…

with one project i was getting a louder than normal pop sound, turned off una corda's mechanical noises and it fixed it. but the problem persists in other places.

i'm not peaking anywhere. if anything i've wondered if it could be too quiet!? i'm using low velocities going for a soft sound.

I've played with both 44.1 and 48k sampling rates, making sure to keep a consistent rate across the project. I've cranked the buffer size up to 1024 but it doesn't help. my cpu is sitting at around 10% during playback. i've tried purging samples. i have no other effects or plugins running; only one instance of kontakt 7 player with una corda.

Any help would be very appreciated.

Jeremy_NI

@isaname Where are your Kontakt libraries installed? On an external hard drive? What is the format of the drive? On Mac it should be APFS: Notes on Hard Drive Formats on Mac Computers

If it's not format related, can you reproduce the issue when using Komplete Kontrol instead of Kontakt? What DAW are you using? Can you share a small audio snippet showing the issue?

isaname

Thanks for responding Jeremy.

It's on the internal drive. DAW is Reaper. I tried on garageband too and got the same issue. I don't know what Komplete Kontrol is but I'll check it out and share an audio snippet when I get back home to my laptop later

isaname

uh oh, i now have the embarassing suspicion that I may just have crackly headphones 🤦‍♂️

can you confirm? this sample sounds fizzy to me. but in other (much cheapier) headphones I can't hear it. Maybe because they're cheapy. Or maybe because my expensive headphones are buggy. Do you hear the cracklyfizz or is it clean?

My usual studio hardware setup is 10,000km away, hence my plan to make a solo midi piano project, which i thought i could get away with doing without proper gear…

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FHHTgZMouDR3j6AlpxJIEVen8NftODJU/view?usp=sharing

Jeremy_NI

Well, it's always hard to say, i mean, hard to describe. It doesn't sound fizzy to me, not 100% clean and slightly muffled but that's the charm of the Una Corda instrument.