Topic: Bursts of static

[yousef]

Someone please help - this is driving me mad...

I've got a recording from a couple of days ago - on-stage mics: DPA4022 > Tinybox>R09. The file plays through fine in Windows Media Player and Reaper but when I put it into Vegas Pro 9 (my preferred prog for timestretching for matrices) I get little bursts of very loud static here and there. I also think there are bits of audio dropped in from elsewhere in the file - as if it had been chopped up and put back together slightly incorrectly. The static appears in the waveform in Vegas.

I re-rendered the file in Reaper but still get the bursts of static albeit in different places when I drop it into Vegas.

I've tried resetting my PC but this achieves nothing.

I've tried doing my timestretching in Reaper but this seems to be limited such that the small amount of adjustment I need is not available (despite making sure that snapping is switched off.)

What on earth is going on? I've carried out this exact same process on this machine, with these programmes, with these sources any number of times. Another source from the same night (SBD>M10) plays in Vegas with no issue.

So how do I get to the bottom of this? Ideally I'd like to get the file to play with Vegas but if it is corrupted in some very particular way that Vegas can't get along with I'll have to timestretch in Reaper - but I don't seem to be able to do this with the degree of accuracy needed.

Help!

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Sounds like an issue with Vegas.

The contents of a WAV file must be properly aligned. Otherwise you get garbage/static, or the channels flip.

The format of a 2 channel WAV file is a series of samples, LEFT and then RIGHT. If you lose one whole sample, the 'stereo' of the channels will flip at that point:

left right
left right
left left
right left
right left

If you lose some portion of a sample, say 8 bits, then you have a sample that is only partial. Much like the left-right example, the remaining data gets assembled incorrectly, producing static.

The first question is how this happened, and can you recover the original audio without error (it sounds like the original data is intact).
If not, then you fix it by deleting the partial sample at the start of the static. When you stumble on the right combination, mostly by trial and error, the portion of the audio that was static will once again look like a normal wave form.

[yousef]

I'm really not sure what's going on here. It seems like there are random 0.2sec bursts of silence and static throughout the track as well as random bits of audio from different parts of the file. But only when playing the track in Vegas.

The fact that the problem still exists in a new version of the file as rendered in a different program suggests that the problem lies with Vegas. Maybe a re-install (or a nice upgrade) is the way to go.

I'd really like to consolidate my workflow and use Reaper alone though so if anyone knows how to get the time-stretching working there, I'd be much obliged.