Audio Clipping upon Saving

Report · Mar 25, 2018

Hi,

I have been encountering an issue lately which seems to occur during the saving process of individual audio files. Prior to a recorded voice track being saved, the audio is completely normal. After being saved however, the tail of the audio is cut (around 1 second of audio) and repeated with a large negative DC offset, resulting in a lot of clipping. Interestingly, the .pkf file does not show any clipping and hence when opened in Audition, the waveform looks normal. Only upon zooming in is the clipping shown. The below images show the audio zoomed out with no clipping and zoomed in with clipping.

I have come across this issue on two separate PC's running Audition CC 2018. This has only started occurring since upgrading from Audition 3.0.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I don't think that this has been seen before AFAIAA. What audio format were you saving to and onto an internal or external hard drive?

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I looked at this earlier, went away and thought about it, and the only time I've ever seen anything like this happen is when there's been some sort of an issue with access to the temp file location. Since there's a good chance that this is a different location to the one Audition 3 uses, this probably bears some investigating. I doubt whether it's size that's the issue, but any space shared with the OS is far more likely to be interrupted than a location that it can't access - if you see what I mean. And yes, the temp file is implicated - it's the last version of the temp file that will be used for the save. If it plays back correctly before saving, then it's going to be the process of reading and writing it to a permanent file that's going to be what's behind this, I'm reasonably sure.

If, at least temporarily, you can set up a temp space on an external USB drive, then it will be relatively easy to establish whether the basic process is working correctly. Other than that, I don't know what to suspect.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi All,

Thank you for the responses. The audio format is usually .wav, occasionally .mp3 and the files are saved to a networked hard drive on another Windows PC, not on the local machine. Perhaps saving to a networked drive is what's causing the issue, although it was never a problem in 3.0.

The temp file location is currently set as C:\users\currentuser\AppData\local\temp. I have set up a temp space on a USB stick to see if anything changes. It's a little hard to tell if will work straight away as the issue doesn't occur every time.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

shanea6319588 wrote
Thank you for the responses. The audio format is usually .wav, occasionally .mp3 and the files are saved to a networked hard drive on another Windows PC, not on the local machine. Perhaps saving to a networked drive is what's causing the issue, although it was never a problem in 3.0.

That has been known to cause some problems in the past, but with generally faster networks it's not so much of a problem these days. That said, whenever I do this (and I do...), I do a save to a local disk first, and then copy the file across the network afterwards, rather than doing a save across it; this is generally a much safer bet.

One thing you have to bear in mind though is that although they look superficially similar, Everything post-Audition 3 is a rewrite from the ground up (a little matter of making it run on Macs), so the way it behaves is inevitably slightly different in terms of the way resources are used, so comparisons don't necessarily apply.

The temp file location is currently set as C:\users\currentuser\AppData\local\temp. I have set up a temp space on a USB stick to see if anything changes. It's a little hard to tell if will work straight away as the issue doesn't occur every time.

The fact that it doesn't happen every time definitely points the finger at either something the OS is doing, or the network. Whilst it's recording, Audition takes a lot of priority away from everything else running to give it the greatest chance of storing data without error, but I don't think that the same thing applies at all to doing a save.

Bottom line - I think that your network saves have probably got a lot to do with this...