Audio... Snap, Crackle and Pops

[movie freak]

i'm capturing some stuff off tv.... and quite often i can hear this snap, crackle and pop noise i was wondering how i can fix it

[SLK001]

Is it real? Some onboard sound devices will do this to the monitoring output (and also on playback) when the system accesses something other than the sound device.

Open a captured file in an audio editor and see if it truely is on the file itself. Snaps, crackles and pops are easily identified by their waveforms.

[movie freak]

oh i see. can you give an example of a audio editor... and how would i be able to notice by the waveforms? thanks

[SLK001]

Cool Edit and Goldwave are two shareware editors.

Here's what a click would look like. Zoom in very tightly around the click, and you will see very large excursions in the waveform of the audio.

(As you can see, I just quickly hand sketched this waveform!)

[MOVIEGEEK]

Audacity is a good freeware app. that has filters to cleanup audio.

[moviewatcher666]

Had the same problem after upgrading to WinXP.

I had a Sound Blaster Live Value card. I formatted the harddrive under XP as NTSF.

Where I was capturing fine under Win98, I was experiencing crackling sound under XP. I found that my sound card was not processing the audio fast enough. As it was an older card, the processor wasn't fast enough to work under capture conditions.

Switched to an Audigy 5.1 sound card (about $100 Cdn) and problems went away.

Check your hardware. May be the same thing.

Hope that helps.

Later,

Moviewatcher666