Severe audio distortion/noise coming through speakers

[Andrew Bird]

Hi Everyone. I gave up on this persistent problem a while back, mainly because it’s always discussed and never solved or mentioned by Apple or M-Audio.

It’s getting me into trouble!
The hell noise has damaged my right ear, given a solo artist The Fear™ and have had 2 commercial clients threaten to sue. It’s very a serious problem if you run your own business.

Deductive reasoning says the problem is not FCPro, Video Filters or Logic Pro/ M-Audio interfaces. Hell Noise can happen in any realtime App. I note that I haven’t seen any posts from Pro Tools HD users.

The COMMON piece of the puzzle here is G-RAID FW 800 drives or similar on the FW buss.
Can anyone confirm if they have external HD on the FW buss when this happens?

I assume everyone here does if you’re producing media. I’ll try USB drives soon and report back.

[Garrett Gibbons]

First off, let me express my satisfaction that my term “hell noise” has caught on.

More importantly, I’ve experienced said noise when working with my internal 7200 RPM IDE drives on my Mac Pro. I’ve certainly experienced it when working from FW400 drives but I don’t own any G-RAID FW800 drives (though clients have had me work off of them from time to time and I can’t say if I got the hell noise more or less often).

The mystery deepens, but I encourage everyone to report on external disk use when it happens so we can get to the bottom of it.

http://www.garrettgibbons.com

[Andrew Bird]

Hell Noise! Wooop woop! Well we can safetly say it’s not the hard disk. 2 hours Hell Noise Hell Noise free after restarting everything.

Engineer neighbour said he never used to get it in 64 bit mode… Only in 32.

[Yancy Faulkner]

Holy sweet baby jesus. Hell noise just happened to me again and I’m happy to see a current thread about it. I’m working on an iMac OS X Version 10.5.8 with FCP 7.0.3, editing a 1080p 30fps project off of a FreeAgent GoFlex 500gb external drive. It is USB 3.0 even though my iMac has USB 2.0 (obviously).

Can’t find a common denominator between this occurrence and the other times it’s happened to me, but you said post if it happened, so I’ma postin’!

Please let me know if anything is figured out!???

[Luke Goodman]

I’ve had this same issue on a macbook retina 15. I’m working in Premiere CC though.

[Emma Crouch]

I’m experiencing sudden audio volume bursts, but I’m using FCPX – is this still a problem for people? I’ve not really managed to find anything on it. Rather than than a random sound (which is what this thread seems to refer to?), it is actually the volume of the clip file that massively increases to heart-stopping volumes. I work with interviews mainly, and it happens randomly at the start of cuts.

Original content is filmed on a C100 as an AVCHD file (h.264), but then transcoded within FCPX to ProRes.

[Sean Nevins]

Hi

I once had this problem with FCP 7 and then not again–until now, but this time using itunes on a macbook pro w/ mntn lion AND listening to a 16 bit 44 khz CD through Itunes. I quit i tunes and started playing a file thru Vox file player and after a while the loud blast of tearing, ripping, high volume digital distortion. Then i shut down the computer pulled out my phone jack and restarted. I also checked audio routing in preferences, deselected headphones and reselected. I restarted the mac, opened itunes and imported same file and it played ok for 1/2 hr or so, no problem, but i stopped listening and watched a movie instead–i was so spooked, and i still am.
My guess is that there might be a conflict between Vox player and Itunes–and this did not happen until after in Vox’s prefs i selected ‘hog mode’, which gives exclusive access, yet the sound also occurred in Vox. Also, Vox is a recent install and I never heard the sound prior, which leads me to suspect that there is a conflict between audio programs–and FCP is an audio program as well a s video. I don’t really need Vox, though I like it better than Itunes, I can’t uninstall itunes, so i’ll uninstall Vox and see how that goes.
So as to a solution, in old mac OS’s you could have different sets of preferences to manage potential conflicts–that was a good idea–current OS’s don’t have that feature, it seems–so you might check to see if you have any other audio related programs on your mac and if you don’t need them, uninstall.
This is a serious problem, so it needs to be solved.
What about mac software update? I’m going to look into sample rate and clock source. But the upshot here is it’s deeper than FCP. It has to do with the sound engine itself.