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Crackling Distorted Audio when 2 clips are overlayed Vegas 14
Hello.
I hope I can reach some kind of conclusion with this thread because I’ve been working on a project for months and this sound issue is really depressing.
– Whenever I overlay 2 separate audio clips I hear a crackled distortion.
– Both clips are fine and do not clip. One is a piece of music and the other is voice recording. The crackling is present even when the voice recording is at low levels.
– The distortion only happens when both clips are playing because when I mute one track it goes away and the audio is fine.
– I’ve tried all sorts of file types including flac, mp3 and wav.
– The distortion is present even in the rendered file.I find it hard to imagine the problem is due to clipping as both tracks do not clip on their own and sound perfect when they play by themselves. It seems like vegas is having an issue playing them both at the same time and somehow it’s exceeding a limit when both played together.
I will answer any questions you might have and appreciate any replies.
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11 Replies
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I do not have this issue with Vegas 14 or any other version of Vegas. Mixing sound tracks in one of the strengths of Vegas. It began as an audio application.
1) Was there a time when you did not encounter this problem with Vegas 14 ?
2) Is this something that began while working on the project you mention?
3) If you start a new project in VP14 with different audio media, can you reproduce the problem?
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Hi Ryan
Just to add to Paul‘s comment, are you using the onboard soundcard or a dedicated separate soundcard ? Onboard’s are notorious for low quality compared with a proper soundcard. Also, make sure that you have the proper driver for your motherboards sondcard, not the generic Windows one.
let’s start with that.
Cheers !
PC Win 10 Pro 64-bit 16gb Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz
Cameras: Canon XF305 + Canon XH-A1
Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio Mini
Vegas Pro 14, User since Vegas 3.0\’\’When the cutting stops, the editing begins…\’\’
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1 . I’ve only ever used vegas 14 and I don’t often encounter it, but I know it has happened sometime in the past.
2. Even with this project, it’s only happened recently. Basically, I’ve had various pieces of music but under narration and everything has been fine up until the last two songs I’ve added. The confusing thing is, I don’t think anything is different. I’ve done the same thing I always do and like I said, both tracks play fine by themselves. It’s only when played together that the issue arises.
3. Yes, it happens in a new project.
I’m not the most knowledgeable when it comes to things like this, but I wouldn’t have thought that two audio clips at the appropriate levels (that don’t clip) would add to the overall level, if you see what I mean. That’s what ‘seems’ to be the case. That two audio clips, that are fairly loud, are pushing each other over the edge and resulting in distortion.
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(Quoting doesn’t seem to be working)
Francois Pénzes,
iI have an ASUS Xonar DGX soundcard.
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So I’ve did a bit more testing and I believe it’s not a problem with sony vegas, but my perhaps with my soundcard or headphones.
Thinking I could bypass the problem by mixing the tracks and exporting it without the use of vegas I think I’ve discovered that the distortion is present in audacity, as well.
It’s very strange because I never hear distortion in anything, but it would seem that soundcard can’t handle a piece of music (set at the right levels) with something else on top of it. I think I can get around this by lowering the volume of things further than I’d like in order to prevent this clipping.
I have checked both audacity and vegas’ meters and they do go above the clipping point (I think. It goes into the red) but I’m confused by that because both tracks don’t clip by themselves. Like I said, it seems additive and both of them together cause the issue.
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https://i.imgur.com/3u5VbbI.png
The distortion doesn’t seem to have anything to do with clipping. Neither of these tracks clip, as you can see, but at certain points they become crackly.
Would really appreciate if you could have a listen to this and see if you hear any distortion on the voice track:
(I exported both the audio track and the vocal track to vegas and the clip didn’t exceed any limits, but the distortion was still there.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te-ifvPRVyM&feature=youtu.be
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I cannot hear any crackling but then the music level is much to loud making it difficult to hear the speech. At least for my ears. I would drop the music level.
Anyway you’ve answered the problem with your comments. Whilst the individual tracks may not be high enough to clip obviously when played together the resulting level is too high. I would have thought that was obvious.
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I don’t actually think it’s obvious at all, and I don’t think it should be the case. This issue is stopping from layering multiple sound effects and so on. Why would two tracks that don’t clip cause clipping?
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I dropped the music level on the second part of the video.
You say yourself that it’s obvious it’d cause clipping…and yet you can’t hear the crackling…
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I don’t hear any distortion on my system with either cut but the mix on the 2nd cut is better with the music more in the BG.
THis could be narrowing down to some hardware, driver, speaker or headphone issue on your system. The technical reasons that the tracks play solo without distortion (on your system) but create distortion when combined might have to do with some unique harmonics that are created when the tracks are mixed. But here I’m over my head. All I can say for sure is that I heard no distortion in the rendered file you posted — just some hot music levels.
Did you try different headphones?
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