I'm not mixing audio tracks. The voice track and song I was talking about are on two different projects. Something else I thought to mention: On the project where I'm using the song, when I first put it into MS it played fine. It was the only track on there at that point. Then I started adding text and still photos and that's when it starting popping in certain places.

How fast is your processor? How much RAM do you have? What other programs are running in the background?

Sounds like the author of this post and I have similar problem because I just posted a thread and saw this one and saw we are both getting pop noises despite the fact that the original being pop-free.

Are the popping noises in the rendered file or do they only happen in the preview? If you switch off all the tracks except the offending one, does it still happen? Do the pops always happen in the same place and, if they do, can you see anything by zooming in on the audio profile?

Ian G.

It is possible that your realtime preview cannot keep up with the processing of your audio and video tracks. It has to choose something to reduce in order to play the preview in realtime.

Try doing a render and see if the generated file has the same probs.

For me, it happens even in the Media Pool preview, as well as the project workspace area. It would seem that the Mp3 Plug-in (least in my case) is corrupted in some way. This might also be the problem with the post author.

Thanks for everyone's reply. Yes, it does seem to be happening in the same spots. I've zoomed in and looked for problems on the track, but don't find any. I'm working on a 1Ghz processor and 128M of RAM and I'm not running any other programs in the background. I will try switching off tracks and also rendering it to see if the same thing happens. Until then, keep coming with the suggestion! :>

A 1 Ghz processor and 128 meg of RAM is really the low end of your technical needs for editing. (I'm assuming you're using a pre-Windows XP OS as XP really needs at least twice that much RAM to do its job.)

It's not impossible, of course, to work with your current resources. But complicated processes (like reading MP3s) might be bit taxing. Rendering as a DV-AVI and then watching the file on Windows Media Viewer should tell you if that's the case.

Regardless, if you can afford the $50, tripling your RAM would be a very good investment.

Yeah, I do need to get more RAM. I wasn't aware I had that little. But shouldn't a 1Ghz processor be plenty? I am running XP Pro and it runs just fine. What about my video card? How much could that have to do with the problem? I recently got a new one. I think it's at least 32M....possibly 64....

OK, I just rendered my project and it's *horrible*. Lots of popping and stuttering.....sounds a lot worse than it did in MS. What's the deal?

I bet it has to do with processor performance. The fact that it is worse after rendering lealds me to that conclusion.
Rendering is a processor intensive activity.

Rendering may be a processor-intensive activity, Christer, but from my experience MS renders with whatever resources you have available. Since rendering doesn't happen in real time, it will just happen slower on slower machines.

RAM could definitely be a problem though -- especially if elorahd hasn't used a program like EndItAll to kill all his background processes. That much RAM with XP would mean a lot of writing back and forth to the hard drive.

So did we confirm that the issue is not a problem with his initial capture but is actually happening during render? Did elorahd play his captured clips in Windows Media Player to make sure they were coming in okay?

Whatever we discover, elorahd, I definitely urge you to bulk that RAM up -- ideally to 512, although 256 minimally. It will make everything about life with XP much less clunky.

I agree with grisetti, processor performance shouldn't be an issue - my old 933MHz PIII never had any problems.

As an experiment, try editing a copy of the audio track - you can define an audio editor in Options / Preferences / Audio, and if you haven't got an audio editor already, Audacity is a good freeware tool. If there are clicks in the copy, then I'd assume that the problem's with the import, if there aren't, then it could still be a resource problem.

Ian G.

I'll definitely bulk up on the RAM. (BTW, I'm a girl. :>) The first render I did was to the default .avi file. Took up 4G of space and looked horrible. Then I tried it as a .wmv file. Took only 2M of space but quality was poor. Then I tried Mpeg1. That seemed to work the best. The video files I'm working with do have the same audio problems when I play the plain captured version in WMP. Unfortunately, the original tape was taped over so I can't recapture. I'm having to go in and manually edit the audio by hand. Big pain in the butt, and I don't know that it will work in the long run, but I'm giving it a try. Here's another question though: I'm going to need to put all this on a dvd eventually that can be played on a dvd player, not just on a computer. Does it matter what kind of movie file I save it as? I've never had to write to a dvd before.

>Does it matter what kind of movie file I save it as? I've never had to write to a dvd before.

You should use one of the DVD templates, but exactly which one depends....
If you're using PAL then it's simple, just use the PAL template, but there are options with NTSC. The NTSC DVD standard supports 2 audio formats, AC-3, which isn't an option in MS, and PCM (wav). A 'normal' MPEG2 uses mp2 audio, which isn't supported but usualy works. So, if your DVD player (and your friends'?) can handle mp2, you can use the NTSC template, if it can't, you'll have to use the video only template and rerender the audio separately.

I'd suggest getting a few rewriteable DVDs and do some experimenting with a short project.

Ian G.

I am unsure of elorads' system, but I have a 2.12 Ghz processor with 768MB PC2700 RAM and a 8mb 80GB Seagate Barracuda and a GeForce FX5900 and for me, the problem tends to happen in the same spots, yet if I convert it to WAVE format, the popping noise is completely gone, so that would indicate to ME that the problems lies with the Mp3 Plugin, which is my original assessment, and may be the same with her computer. Is there anyway to replace the mp3 plugin for Sony Screenblast since I have no problems playing mp3s in Windows Media Player.. I tried uninstalling, rebooting and re-installing, but to no avail. Am I not getting all the files removed, such as the mp3 plugin?

I'm not sure if my problems are similar. For my recently AVI-rendered video, I had 1 WAV audio and 2 MP3 audio, including the video's original vocals. I noticed that in MS4 my music all played out ok but there was a noticeable very slow pulsating feel to the music (rather faint but can be felt). I thot it was due to MS4. But the same was heard in the rendered AVI file. It was disastrous.

My machine is a 2GB RAM machine with 1.5GHz clockspeed. A recent video I did did not have this same problem.

Could my problem be due to one clip being played back in slow-motion? (I am grasping at straws here ...)

On a hunch, I did a quick test:
1. Create a new project and import in a music that was used in earlier project that gave the "throbbing" playback. The new project's music played out PERFECTLY!
2. Went back to earlier problematic project, re-imported in the music. Same problem with "throbbing" exists.

Help! Does it mean that I have to re-create my entire earlier project into a brand new project? It would mean hours of re-editing.

I don't know, but it's got to be worth comparing the properties of the two projects and seeing if there's a difference!

Ian G.