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Hello everyone. This is a particular situation, I don't know if this is the right forum to ask this question. A friend of mine has an M-Audio Fasttrack C400 audio interface, and a Samson C01 condenser mic. They use Ableton Live (9 I think?) to record. To practice for a recording, this friend likes to open up Ableton to set up a recording track with monitoring, and open up YouTube on Chrome to play the backing track they have for practicing, and they practice with that setup. Apparently, they were able to do this without an issue before, but now, when they sing and the input clips, it clips really harshly doing a nasty crackling. Someone suggested changing the output's bit depth from 24 to 16, and it reduced the crackling a little bit, but it didn't go away. We tested doing a little bit of saturated input within Ableton Live, without YouTube playing, and it didn't crackle. A detail to take into account is that, before, they formerly used an older version of the interface's drivers, version 1.0.4 if I recall correctly. Recently, the interface would sometimes crash, it would go mute if some programs weren't opened and closed in the right order, and they had to restart the computer to get it working again. Because of this, I updated the driver to version 1.1.7 and that stopped happening. But now there's this clipping issue. Could it be directly related to this? I await your answers. Thank you all in advance.

Something I've noticed while streaming Tidal on my Windows 10 PC is clipping and distortion. I'm currently using Peter's Equalizer APO (Peace). With a flat EQ or with EQ turned off, I get clipping. I decided to test Spotify and levels never reach clipping. Current setup: Windows 10 vol 100% => Tidal app vol 100% => Schiit Jotunheim w/DAC module => Headphones Taking the software vol control in Tidal down a bit does stop the clipping, but I figured that should be maxed out given my setup. Spotify has it's vol control maxed with no issues. Any thoughts?

I am currently recording my vinyl collection into high resolution Flac files currently using Adobe Audition but looking to buy Vinyl Studio if it can do all I need it to, which on first appearance looks like it can. However, I am looking for advice. My current setup is Technics SL 1210 MKII, Pioneer DJM-500 mixer, Mac Book Pro running windows 7. With this setup, I have discovered 2 major problems which means that the Vinyl I have recorded so far, will have to be discarded and I'll need to start over. The problems are: 1) Quite a lot of the recordings I have made are suffering scratchy type noises. At first I thought that it was because of a worn stylus, but when I listened to the audio from the source (IE headphones plugged into the mixer, the audio was flawless). So the these flaws were as a result of the analogue to digital conversion happening within the sound card of the Mac. I think this is what is called 'Clipping' but I am not sure. 2) I am finding that there are a lot of timing errors in the recorded audio. IE when you play back the audio, there can sometimes be a lot of micro jumps, almost like slight skipping as though small fractions of the audio were not recorded properly and thus are not in the resultant audio. I have tested on different devices and this happens consistently so I know its a problem with the recording itself rather than the playback. Now for both of these issues, I think that the problem is caused by the limited capability of the sound card in the Mac and I am guessing that I may be able to resolve both of these issues by using an offboard USB device (IE like an external soundcard). There are 3 products that I am thinking of purchasing: a) Propellaheads Balance USB Audio interface b) Tascam US-366 c) Apogee Duet I would like your expert opinion as to whether you think one of these type of devices will help in resolving the issues I have documented. Looking forward to hearing your views, thanks.

Are there any data on how often amps hit clipping?