I have been having a very frustrating ordeal with trying to get rid of the clicks/pops/noise on my recordings. I have been very thorough about trying many optimizations but nothing has worked yet. If anyone could help me I would be forever in their debt..

My set-up: 650 AMD Duron/VIA Chipset/384MB RAM/20 Gig 7200 RPM WD HD master/40 Gig 7200 RPM WD HD slave now used only for Waves(though I had previously had about 20 gigs of mp3s on there). I also have a network card hooked to a cable modem, I tried disconnecting this thinking that I was getting some unintentional signals being sent, but did not get any results.

Signal path is just a Shure 57 or guitar into a Digitech RP2000 into the front bay of a Soundblaster Live! I have a Delta 44 on the way and will be buying a pre-amp and RNC soon so that my vocals are not going through the RP2000 any longer. I am using Samplitude 2496, and used to use Cool Edit Pro where the problem was even worse. The clicking gets progressively worse the more files I have even if some are muted.

I had originally thought the problem was that my HD was getting too full (it was up to 33gigs). So I bought a CD-RW and archived all the 33 gigs, I removed everything but 9 gigs, repartitioned my drive using PartitionMagic, and moved the 9 gigs to the E partition. Btw, the cluster size on the D and E partition are 32k. I defragged the D partition (doubt it did much on an empty drive of course), but didn't see the need to reformat an empty partition. I have done some recording on the now near-empty D partition but still get clicking. Strangely, the clicking is now regulated at about every second, sometimes it will skip a click, but it always seems to fall on a certain "beat". The strangest thing is that this wasn't always the case, but maybe some of the optimizations that I have done in the last few days have changed something, or maybe got rid of some of the clicking and left this behind? It sort of sounds like a clock issue but I don't know what I can do about that.

By the way, these are the optimizations I have made:
-- made sure DMA was checked
-- in sys.ini, set:
[vcache]
minfilecache=8192
maxfilecache=8192
-- experimented with cache settings in Samplitude, setting them as high as 256mb, which did nothing more than slow me down.
-- Disabled Read Ahead Optimization and Write Behind Caching in System Performance.
-- Used the network server performance profile.
-- cleaned out my system tray and made sure that no programs are running.
-- checked to see how my resources look when recording, I usually have ninety-five percent of my system resource's free.

I have tried:
-- lowering the bit rate when recording to 22, but I still got clicks over my chipmunk voice.
-- recording to the Windows Recorder, strangely I got no clicks here, but a lot of hiss.
-- lowering the graphics acceleration to 0, this did nothing so I set it back to full.

Optimizations that I didn't try:
-- setting different network profiles, as I assume that disconnecting the cable to my card would do the some thing.
-- setting virtual memory because I think that with 384MB ram this isn't an issue.

These are the places where I found different optimizations if anyone is curious: P">http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&th=72676509CDd0247,2&seekm=YTRt6.45742%24Xt3.6868490%40news1.rdc1.az.home.comP http://www.greatidea.com/paris/hd.htm

But so far nothing has worked, can anyone give a suggestion based on the fact that it is now a regulated click? Thanks so much.