Digitalt noise in Digitakt overbridge recordings

Hi!

I’ve been having an issue with my Digitakt for a while, and wondering if anyone here could shed some light on this issue. I use it with Overbridge streaming into Ableton. With certain sounds, I get this digital noise in the recording once I record a clip into ableton. This noise does not exist when I monitor the sound, only when I record the clip and listen back to it. Here’s a recording of some 808 toms in which the noise shows up (it’s the high-pitch digital noise that seems to follow the envelope of the sound that I’m talking about). Any ideas what this could be??

This sounds to me like some sort of bit reduction or distortion effect.

But it could just be that the Overbridge sample rate rate conversion isn’t steady.
In which case you should try to reduce CPU usage while recording.

Thanks @DreamXcape. I’ve tried keeping my computer extra cool and shutting down other applications while recording, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Any other suggestions? I’ve put in a ticket with Elektron to see if they know what’s going on. Here’s another example with a kick drum:

You could try to put your computer in high power mode.
If it’s a laptop this could make a big difference, like plugging in the power cord does for some.

Play with the buffer sizes for your audio interface and Overbridge.
While a bigger buffer size can protect from buffer underruns, it can also choke a system because a larger amount of memory has to be managed.
Increasing the buffer size beyond a certain point will actually degrade the peformance.
Every system has a “sweet spot” where it performs best.
If you go too far below or above that, performance will suffer a lot.

Windows only:
Update all drivers for your computer, especially the audio drivers.
Try to work with the drivers that Windows Update can install, most of those are lighter on the system and tested.
Only install driver packages from the manufacturer if you really need them.

I hope this helps, but sometimes these types of processes can’t be stabilized if the system is not up for it. And it’s not always dependent on system speed, a lot of factors come into play.

For what it’s worth, using the Digitakt as the main audio interface for Ableton(with or without Overbridge) should eliminate the problem completely because you bypass the SRC process.
It may be a bit of a hassle, but at least you should always get clean recordings this way.

If anyone comes across this thread and wants to know the solution, for me it was that I’d accidentally set Ableton recording to 16 bit instead of 24 bit which was creating some high frequency distortion. Hope that helps :slight_smile:

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