Audio shock

[Sound22Card]

Has anyone run across this: When cleaning up a single track of speech sometimes, always while scrubbing for an error or artifact in the waveform, I will suddenly get a loud, rough tone in my headphones or on speaker which is quite loud and disturbing. It's loud enough to hurt. Everything else still works fine but as soon as I try to scrub again, it is there. I usually have to save as a project, close Reaper and bring it back up, in order to continue. Sometimes I have the track in Pause when this happens, but not every time. All the times though, the track is selected as I am working on it. This obnoxious tone is the same loud volume whether my cans are turned up or not.
It is definitely something going wrong and not just a waveform sound.

[Fabian]

Do you have Automatically mute master when volume exceeds <some value> or Automatically mute any track when volume exceeds <some value> set? It is in the preferences, on the Audio > Mute/Solo page.

If that is not set, then set it to something useful. Default is +18 dB, I set that to +3 dB.

Once that is set, if you still get the loud noise, then it doesn't come from Reaper, but from some other place along your audio chain.

[Sound22Card]

Thankyou for this suggestion. I will reply when it happens again.