If those interruptions become more frequent, the isolated clicks and pops turn into occasional crackles, and eventually to almost continuous interruptions that sound like distortion as the audio starts to break up more regularly. So if you hear even a single click in your audio recording or playback, it's due to something occupying Windows that prevents it from filling and emptying those audio buffers in time for smooth delivery to your audio interface. If the buffers are too small and the data runs out before Windows can get back to top them up (playback) or empty them (recording), you'll get a gap in the audio stream - a click or pop. Similarly, during audio recording, the incoming data slowly fills up a second set of buffers, and Windows comes back every so often to grab a chunk of this and save it to your hard drive. For playback, the soundcard continues accessing the data within these buffers while Windows goes off to perform its other tasks, and hopefully Windows will get back soon enough to drop the next chunk of audio data into the buffers before the existing audio data has all been used up. To maintain a continuous audio stream when recording or playing back a song, small chunks of system RAM (buffers) are used to temporarily store a chunk of audio at a time. This, for instance, makes it possible to simultaneously print out a document while typing another one, listening to a WAV file and downloading a file from the Internet. No computer operating system can do everything at once, so a multitasking operating system such as Windows instead creates the illusion that it's doing everything at once, by running lots of separate smaller tasks in turn, each one consuming a share of the available CPU (processor) and I/O (peripheral) cycles. Introductionīefore we start, I'll explain the fundamental cause of audio clicks and pops. They can be caused by a wide variety of factors, from a single unsuitable software setting to conflicts between hardware devices, so this month we're providing a logical step-by-step troubleshooting guide. We've published lots of fault-finding hints and tips in SOS, but quite a few PC musicians still seem to be suffering from audio clicks and pops, also known as gapping. Tracking down their causes can be far from easy – but our step-by-step troubleshooting guide is here to help. Cicks and pops can ruin a recording, not to mention causing vast amounts of annoyance and wasted time.

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