noisy recording..

Dear Forum,

Here a very basic questions…

  1. I am very new to jack and ardour. I just
    installed both and started using ardour… just for
    testing I recorded with my headset microphone and the
    outcome was extremely noisy… full of cracking and popping.

According to the terminal where I am running jackd,
the latencies are most of the time much less than 10 ms.
(very) occasionally they jump into more than ~ 20 ms
(the cracking and popping was continuous… very bad).
… so the latencies should not be a problem?

For comparison, I also used the KDE’s standard recording program
“krecord” and it recorded OK.

Thank You!

Try starting jack with “Number of periods of playback latency” set to 3. eg. --nperiods 3

You might find you actually have to lower the latency (frames per period) to get this to work, as I think the memory for the buffers can be quite small on the sound card.

My internet box has a ‘Intel Corporation 82801I’ card and will only do nperiods 3 for 512 or less frames per period.
It makes a load of nasty noises if I use 2 nperiods (the default).

It works! Thank You!

.sampsa

i have the same problem, sometimes it will record and playback nice and clear for a while, then all this distortion sets in making it too noisy to use anymore. Can you help me? i’ve tried lots of different variations but it still seems fuzzy and distorted.

here are my jack settings… driver oss frames/period 512, sample rate 44100, periods/buffer 3, word length 16, port maximum 256, timeout msec 500. thats all the important ones anyways…
how can i make my recordings clear? what worked for you guys exactly?
thanx:)

oh, im using qjackctl to control jackd, incase that helps…

What sound card are you using?

Try change the sample rate up to 48000 if your card supports it?

If you don’t use realtime kernel, use it!
I get much lower CPU usage of JACK and absolute smoothness on Celeron 1500 with it.