AARGH !!! What is causing my timecode to flip out !?
So I have been having timecode issues since the last days of 2012.
First I bought new needles. (Got Shure M44-7s now)
Got 1210 recalibration, cleaning, tone arm tightening, new cables, new RCAs.
I clean my timecode vinyl with a piece of cloth before each set, and today I even cleaned my Shures with those little brushes that come with ortofons. I have dust covers for my technics.
I did a full tonearm calibration (height, weight and anti-skate) not too long ago and I do it about once a month, just to be safe.
These issues also appear when using my older Ortofon Concorde pros.
Also changing mixer channels (Scratch-certified Korg Zero 4) seems to have no effect.
I was 40 mins into a deep house set, not even halfway by far and traktor is freaking out, have a listen to the last 5 minutes or so:
If it’s not heat then I don’t know… As long as the pvc pipes don’t block your fans, that stand will be fine. No reason NOT to stick the coolballs on as well, though (for 99p!).
I don’t use Traktor (right now - but maybe soon…) so I don’t know if there is any kind of issue with using .mp3’s like there is with Live… Decoding cache? Loading into RAM?
If you haven’t I’d strongly recommend you open a support ticket with NI about this.
When the music starts going crazy what does the timecode signal look like? Checking the timecode graphs will tell you whether it is a timecode reading problem (your timecode graph starts looking bad) or a sound decoding problem (your timecode graph looks fine).
Have you tried the recent beta with the new timecode algorithm? Mk 1 vs. Mk. 2 timecode? What does Traktor’s load indicator and your cpu usage look like when it goes crazy? Have you tried a different soundcard? What are specs of the laptop?
What is your latency set at? What do you have turned off in the background (screen saver, wifi, services, bluetooth ect.) what otyer programs are you running ( audacity, itunes, winamp).
Run SMCfancontrol at 5000 RPM just to be sure your macbook stays cool.
Tell us a little about your set-up in the digital area.
What sample rate and buffer size are you using? Are the timecodes MK1 or MK2?
Is your TSP legit or not? What version are you running?
Timecode signal is fucking terrible, when it happens, just fucking drops to zero pretty much.
Mk. 2 timecode
Will look at cpu next time it happens.
I don’t have an other external soundcard.
13" Macbook Pro (early 2011) 2.3 GHz intel core i5, 4 GB of RAM
but when I run traktor no crazy other things are open, sometimes itunes and google chrome.
Oh I do run audacity to record tho.
EDIT AUDACITY QUESTION:
When you record with audacity is it writing a file on your harddrive, or is the project file being saved with temporary memory ?
Do hard drives struggle with reading (such as playing a song in traktor) and writing at the same time?
can’t listen to the example at work, but I had a problem with timecode where it seemed like the timecode was ‘looping’ even when I lift the needle.
This was solved by disabling multi-processor support in the Traktor preferences.
Audacity isn’t using my mixer 's sound card. Technically it’s possible to record with just the mixer, but I preferred to keep things simple: Mixer record out => laptop’s audio in
I’ve contacted NI, curious about the response.
And pretty sure this problem happened when traktor was running and only traktor sometimes as well, now that I think of it.
I had the same problem on Traktor 2.6. The track would loop and keep looping even if I lift the needle. It only happens to me when I let the record run to the end. I just re calibrated the timecode and it works fine.
actually we are aware of a bug in the MAC OSX 10.6 audio system that can cause
issues like the one you described.
While Apple fixed this for 10.7.5 and 10.8.2 (and all later versions), the bug was
never fixed for OSX 10.6.
Since this caused repeatedly problems under this OS, we now finally removed this
OS from our minimum recommendations, so Traktor now indeed requires 10.7 or 10.8.
(we even integrated a check into our installers to permit that Traktor 2.6.1 can
be installed under os 10.6)
Since there is no other way to avoid that 10.6 problem, I strongly suggest to
update to OSX 10.7 or 10.8.
Interesting. I used Traktor for years on 10.6 with an Audio 8 (and then later a Denon DN-X1600) using vinyl timecode and never had this problem (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just means I never bumped into it). But that would explain why they no longer support 10.6 as of 2.6.1.
I believe I ran Traktor with 10.6 for many months before this happened to me.
Either the bug can lurk for a long time and strike without warning or NI has made a deal with Apple and they get a percentage of all new OS upgrades sometime after the 2.6.1 update. conspiracy
I’ve been having a similar problem where I lose timecode signal after around 40 minutes. The music starts wavering +/-1% until it loses out completely. If I try to recalibrate, it says “calibration failed, unknown medium”. Only thing that fixes is pulling the USB cable from the Audio8 out of the MBP and putting it back in.
I’ve opened a ticket with NI and they’ve asked for screenshots when the timecode signal indicator starts going wonky.
