Distorted tracks

[RPK]

Thanks in advance for any help. I just finished recording a song with four tracks of guitars, vocals and drums. It sounded as good as I could do with decent levels and no clipping. I listened several times to get a final mix. All of a sudden the whole song got extremely distorted. All tracks. Even though none of the channels were clipping?? I deleted the song and started again. Played it back several times all was o.k. Part way through the song there was a brief moment of total distortion again. Does anyone have any ideas.
Thanks, RPK

[ivansc]

plugin working in demo mode?

[serr]

Stuff like an audio interface driver crashing or the audio interface getting a request for a different sample rate from another app can cause playback to be distorted.

The actual audio tracks getting corrupted though?

If you verify your settings and audio interface connection and drag those files into a new clean project (to remove those variables) do you still have distorted corrupted files? You've determined that the actual audio files are corrupted? "I deleted the song and started again." Makes it sound like you were positive the audio files were permanently corrupted.

I remember Protools doing this with SD2 files back 15 years ago. What was happening was a single byte of the audio data would get dropped from the file. 24 bit audio is 3 bytes for every sample. The audio stream is thus: ABC ABC ABC... etc. Drop a byte and you get ABA BCA BCA... (dropped the 3rd byte in that example). So now the audio data is out of order. There's still audio data there so the out of order 3 byte chunks sound distorted.

If you find the spot it dropped the byte, you can open a hex editor and insert a byte and get your audio files back.

[RPK]

Ok thanks. That is beyond my very weak computer knowledge. The files were probably not corrupted. I would have no real way of telling or knowing what to do either way. Surprisingly to me, it happened right during playback.
RPK

[serr]

Probably something simpler, yes. It just triggered that memory for me. If you had already tried everything troubleshooting, then maybe go out into the weeds like that.

What have you tried?
For example, did the project continue to be distorted after saving it, closing Reaper, and reopening it? How about opening an older version? (That would assume you hit 'save as' here and there and update the project name and keep multiple revisions.) There's your tip of the day.

By total distortion you mean garbled constant blasted out as opposed to clicks and pops? Hard drive read troubles usually give you clicks and pops. It's the sound of dropouts. Connection issues with the audio interface often result in distorted sound.

I usually check the interface connection first.
If some other app messes with the audio in the background, sending a new request from Reaper would fix it. So...
Open Reaper Preferences/Audio/Device. Select your interface from the device menu (even though it already appears selected). The 'apply' button will ungrey. Click it.

Try that if there's a next time.

It could be something wildly left field different of course. A laptop with less than good cooling might overheat after an hour and start throttling CPU.

[DVDdoug]

Even though none of the channels were clipping??

How about the master? Mixing is done by summation so the mix can easily clip even if the original tracks don't.


You might not hear it in REAPER because REAPER uses floating-point and is virtually impossible to clip. If you render to a "regular" WAV file it will be clipped if the levels go over 0dB. Your DAC will also clip at 0dB but that also depends on the playback level.