My ears are ringing from blast of white noise from Logic 9

hi,
don't post here anymore 4 varying reasons, but i thought i'd add fuel to this fire.
i've had two disasters regarding bursts of white noise.
first one cost me 2 tweeter drivers ($au1200) and some hearing loss.
and the next, one woofer ($au1250).
these are tannoys, btw. 15"duals.

j.



<Edited by Host>

a frightening topic and as someone said here, a serious problem.

i've had these attacks of whitenoise once or twice, if protools had the prob and fixed then apple must do the same, preferably yesterday

i can see big lawsuits forming on the horizon unless this one is addressed

maximum sympathy and trust the ears will recover

Hey guys. my Logic Pro is going on crazy. As soon as i click on an instrument to play it, it begins to play by itself and i can't stop it until i press mute. And the sound is very ear piercing!
PLEASE HELP ME URGENTLY!
Mish

I have had this problem in Logic 8 and 9 but only when recording audio tracks, not virtual inst. I reinstalled my audio driver which I use a MOTU UltraLite (original not the hybrid) and that cleared up the problem. Occasionally, this problem will pop up but it always stops after reinstalling the audio driver.

Have you experienced blasts of white noise while using Logic to record or play back audio?
• Yes

Under what conditions has the noise occured?

c) both

After recording audio, has the waveform overview ever looked normal but playback resulted in white noise?
• No--always excruciatingly loud sustained bursts in waveform

After recording audio, has the waveform overview ever appeared like a thick solid white bar that filled the entire waveform display (peak-to-peak waveform level)?
• Yes

Computer -- complete specs of your Mac, including:
• iMac i7 quadcore, 2.66 GHz, 16 GB RAM


OS
10.6.4

Logic
• Version # on which you experience this problem
currently 9.1.1, but happened with 8 also

Frequency
• in Logic 8 with MBPro, every 3 days or so, with current setup, twice in 6 weeks

Audio Interface
• MOTU 8pre
• FW800

Hard Drives -- list each audio drive which you've used in the course of production and from which audio recording or playback has resulted in a white noise blast. Leave this part blank if you don't experience the white noise problem.
• 500 GB Maxtor One Touch Plus, Buffalo 250 GB
• Type: external
• FW800
• Is this your system drive? No
• Journaling: ?
• if using a FW or eSATA drive, is the drive daisy-chained to any other devices? If so, describe the chain...

daisy-chained through MOTU 8pre, however I have tried multiple configurations, all with this problem

Add'l Info and Observations
I cannot afford to lose recordings, as I am a live recording engineer for orchestras. Also, my feed going to backstage monitors and all over the venue is risky and embarrassing when this issue happens. How do you explain to your boss after you blow out his ear drums that you have no control over this? I am ******. Come on Apple, get your **** together.

After reporting here quite some time ago that I've never experienced this problem, it finally happened to me the other day running Logic 8.0.2.

DETAILS
The recorded waveform looked normal in the arrange page but playback was pure noise. Thinking that I could maybe "trick" Logic into playing this file back correctly I performed a sample editor TRIM function on the file (I needed to do this anyway) and the normal dialog that reports how many samples need to be moved appeared and disappeared in a flash -- very unusual behavior since it normally lingers for several seconds when doing this process on long files.

Then I tried to open the file in QT but my computer totally froze up before the player appeared.

Forced a restart. Opened the file again in QT and same thing -- computer totally froze. Couldn't even exact a Force Quit.

Force restart again, re-opened the project and got this error:

!http://www.score2picture.com/L9pix/wnb2.jpg!

Sorry about the blackout, but I'm under an NDA on this project. Anyway, I hit "repair" but then deleted the file, as I didn't want to take any chances.

AUTOPSY
My project drive was dangerously close to being full to capacity. Hey, what can I say, I'm crazy busy and creating rather than housekeeping at the moment. I also discovered (via Disk Doctor) that my system drive had serious directory errors.

After making repairs and freeing up room on my project drive all is well again.

_CONCLUSIONS and COMMENTS_
Draw whatever conclusions you will from the above, but per what I theorized some time ago in this thread the problem has something to do with HD buffering, esp. when a disk gets near full capacity or otherwise can't be filled/emptied in time. And kudos to the devs for allowing this thread to reach over 34K views with nary a reply. IMO the song and dance about this being a u2u board just doesn't cut it when the problem is this serious and the view count gets this high.

iSchwartz wrote:
... And kudos to the devs for allowing this thread to reach over 34K views with nary a reply. IMO the song and dance about this being a u2u board just doesn't cut it when the problem is this serious and the view count gets this high.

+1

Good to see you here IS.... hope all is going well...

iSchwartz wrote:
And kudos to the devs for allowing this thread to reach over 34K views with nary a reply.

First I didn't get this, but looking up the word "nary" (="not one") helped.
Yep, they could have chimed in - they should have chimed in. Some time ago.

IMO the song and dance about this being a u2u board just doesn't cut it when the problem is this serious and the view count gets this high.

Do you mean it is over the heads of any user (it obviously is) and so there should have been visible activity/research from the dev-side? If that's what you mean, I agree. Though I have not encountered the issue myself.

...and btw, the corrupted header data might be an important clue, a superclue! I believe it was (is?) Soundhack (on OS 8, 9 aka "classic") that could actually access the header data, AND it could "play" any data as audio. Needless to say, anything exept audio data sounded like a full blast of noise. So to me it seems plausible that non-audio data is being read as audio data when this happens in Logic. So who left the gate open?
Remarks, contradictions, corrections anyone? Devs?

-

I am now infinitely curious. Will you repost the screenshot without blackout once the NDA has expired? 🙂

Good to hear from you IS-

I think the "corrupted wave header" is but one variation of the white noise issue.

There's one where the waveform is visible and will play normally, at some point one can see (and hear, oy!) the burst of white noise, it's visible in the waveform.

There's also the end of file (EOF) error where the data becomes corrupted and leaves a burst of noise at the end of the file. There may be another where no warning is given, wave file looks normal yet there is blast of white noise in the track. (not sure about this last one)

A few years back Logic would often corrupt wave headers if the standard recording format was set to WAV.

pancenter-

p.s. IS, there's a syndicated comic out (W.T.Duck) that reminds me of your comics style.

http://img534.imageshack.us/i/wtduck.jpg/

pancenter-

Hey Guys,

Real quick... nice to see you all again! Re comics, I was very tempted to post a comic quoting Jim saying to me (per his post) "hope all is going well" and me responding with "what?!?!?!?!" (Get it?) But I anticipate that it would get deleted, and this is a serious matter so this time I'm not messing around. But all is well here in iSchwartzville, thanks Jim, and I hope life and music are treating the rest of you well as well.

Cheers and Best Regards,

iSchwartz

Hi,

just a technical addition to the corrupt file header topic: for a non-musical goal I've been programming a tool that had to open 16-bit audio files, so I gained some knowledge about audio file structure. As most of you probably know, a byte is 8 bits. So, you need 2 bits for each 16 bits sample: the Most Significant bit (which is actually all info you would have if the file was 8 bit audio), and the Least Significant bit, which adds precision. So, if for one reason or another, Logic would mix those 2 up (e.g. the whole file "shifts" by 1 bit), you get a terrible blast of noise, because the value of the LSB is "random", whereas the MSB sounds like normal audio. With 24 bit audio, you'll have the same problem, whether you shift the bytes by 1 or by 2 bytes.
The other thing is that Wav is Little Endian and Aif Big Endian, which means that the 1's an 0's of the bytes are stored in opposite order. So, if Logic suddenly THINKS that a file is a wav, where it's really an aif, you'll get a terrible noise, too.
I know, this info doesn't help solve the issue, but maybe it brings someone to new ideas?!
By the way, I never had this white noise blast issue on my Mac (lucky me...)
Regards,
Jaap

jaap wrote:
Hi,

just a technical addition to the corrupt file header topic:
The other thing is that Wav is Little Endian and Aif Big Endian, which means that the 1's an 0's of the bytes are stored in opposite order. So, if Logic suddenly THINKS that a file is a wav, where it's really an aif, you'll get a terrible noise, too.

Many years ago there was a free wave editor on the PC called CoolEdit that let you play around with the header bits. Indeed, a single bit alteration filled the wave editor top to bottom with a blast of white noise. Very useful program for dealing with raw audio files or files with a corrupted header. It's still out there on some sites and was such a great piece of programming it probably still runs on newer OS.

The author eventually sold a multi-track version to Adobe and it became "Adobe Audition".

pancenter-

So - as someone who is just about to put a toe in the waters of Logic (and is now shrinking back ...Audition, where are you?) ... are you suggesting that Logic ONLY deals with either the AIF or the WAV and we (I) don't confuse the poor ol' b **r by having both anywhere on the system?

My ears are really too delicate to have this kind of white-noise rubbish destroying them ........

Hi,

no, if the problem was that simple, Apple would certainly have fixed it. But it seems that for some strange reason, sometimes the system makes a mistake. Mind you, I'm still not so sure if it's Logic's "fault". As said, I never had this on my Mac, and a couple of years ago I was in the studio of a PC + Cubase using friend, when the white noise blast thing happened to him...

regards,
Jaap

jaap wrote:
Hi,

no, if the problem was that simple, Apple would certainly have fixed it. But it seems that for some strange reason, sometimes the system makes a mistake. Mind you, I'm still not so sure if it's Logic's "fault". As said, I never had this on my Mac, and a couple of years ago I was in the studio of a PC + Cubase using friend, when the white noise blast thing happened to him...

Having been on the Cubase forums I can say that I've never seen this problem raised unless there was a hardware failure happening, specifically, a hard drive going bad or a hard drive with a lot of errors. The chances of it happening in PC land should be greater considering the thousands of hardware configurations available... so I'd say the problem lies with Logic or Core Audio. Personally... I think it's part of Logic's renown efficiency. The fact that plugins aren't active unless data is passing through them. There's a host of small problems caused by Logic's buffering.... Everything from system overloads to noise when some plugins become active, to Logic missing the first beat of a measure when starting on 1. (those are just of the top of my head)

I don't think anyone is willing to trade that efficiency for the current problem set, can't say as I blame this, using a G5 the efficiency is welcomed.

Anyway, I have no proof but always thought Logic somehow scrambles data that's held in it's buffer under high loads or slow disk access. That's why some white noise bursts don't even show up in the editor.

Just a thought or two.

pancenter-