Crackling in guitar signal. I can't find the source

Gear
#1

I don’t know what to look for anymore, I’ve checked two interfaces (Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, Motu M2, both inputs, different buffer sizes), three guitars (one of them was recently completely re-wired by a luthier to eliminate noise), brand new cables, two different laptops, tried powering stuff from an electric outlet or from laptop battery, tried unplugging monitors from my interface, even tried turning off my phone, wifi and unplugging mouse from usb.

I use a really low gain input on the interface, I’ve EQ’d out lows and mids and boosted the whole thing so you can hear it well. The noise is not consistent, as you can hear it’s present only in about the first half of the clip. I can’t record a few bars without it kicking in.

#2

Sounds like vinyl - keep it! :rofl:

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#3

Ok, I think I need Ghostbusters’ services to solve this. If I start to play the clip from the beginning it crackles, if I start from somewhere in the middle it doesn’t. It happens even if I render the clip, if it’s from start there’s crackling, if it’s from somewhere in the middle there’s no crackling. Also if you listen to these 2 clips, in the first one now there’s crackling where it wasn’t before if you compare it to the clip that I’ve posted in the 1st post. W T F???

#4

What’s the sampling rate and buffer size; try increasing the buffer size a tad and see if that helps.

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#5

Changing buffer size doesn’t help. This is definitely a sample rate issue. It’s super weird, if I set both in and out to 44.1k it crackles like there’s some kind of sample rate conversion going on. It doesn’t crackle when I’m recording it, it does when I play it afterwards. Then when the clip is already recorded I set the I/O SR to 48k or any other SR and it stops crackling on playback. There’s some kind of software issue going on, something like in or out SR is displayed incorrectly. I need to check some other DAW.

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