Any way to avoid Pre-Rendering?

Question

Hello Community,
So I've been working with adobe audition since 5.5 and have upgraded as the updates came out.
The music I've been making usually consist of 10 to 15 tracks, 32-bit (float), and 192000 Hz.
The only way for me to edit without hearing pops and crackles is to pre-render everything. I have the task manager up while I work and it doesn't look like my CPU is being worked that hard. I have an i7-4930k overclocked to 4.5Ghz, 32GB of RAM at 2400 mhz, the OS is on a RAID-0 configuration, Audition is on a separate SDD and I have the footage on another HDD.
I was wondering if there was a way for me to avoid pre-rendering and still not hear the pops and crackles.
Do I need a sound card to avoid this?
Am I rendering my audio with bad settings?
Is my drive configuration not optimized correctly?
Thanks for the help,
Arren

Answer 1

TheCheeseling wrote:
The music I've been making usually consist of 10 to 15 tracks, 32-bit (float), and 192000 Hz.
Is this music for bats? You are asking the streaming system to do at least twice as much work as even a hopeless optimist working at 96k would, and even they are recording nothing but noise on half of their disk space!
The only way for me to edit without hearing pops and crackles is to pre-render everything. I have the task manager up while I work and it doesn't look like my CPU is being worked that hard. I have an i7-4930k overclocked to 4.5Ghz, 32GB of RAM at 2400 mhz, the OS is on a RAID-0 configuration, Audition is on a separate SDD and I have the footage on another HDD.
I was wondering if there was a way for me to avoid pre-rendering and still not hear the pops and crackles.
Do I need a sound card to avoid this?
Am I rendering my audio with bad settings?
Is my drive configuration not optimized correctly?
The bit I bolded frightened me most. Are you seriously trying to use on-board sound to sample at 192k??? That's positively insane! On-board sound devices are of incredibly poor quality, and almost certainly don't run natively at this rate anyway, so there will be on-the-fly resampling going on. This wrecks the sound quality beyond belief.
Humans can hear (if they're really young) up to about 20kHz - this figure drops considerably in adults due to presbycusis. To sample audio past the highest point humans can hear requires a sampling rate of no more than 44.1kHz. There used to be arguments about higher sample rates 'sounding' better, but with modern sound devices that oversample rather than using brick-wall filters, there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to going beyond this. And the sample rate only affects the highest frequency that can be recorded (half of the sample rate, known as the Nyquist frequency) - doesn't alter anything else to do with 'quality' or anything else.
What it does mean though is that you can spare your drives a lot of hard work. The reason that you are hearing clicks whilst the computer's only ticking over is simply because you are trying to stream four times as much data as you need to. The other thing I discovered recently is that over clocking is sometimes detrimental to system performance in strange ways. If the processor isn't working hard then you simply don't need to over-clock it - you're just warming it up more!
If you are going to do any serious work with Audition at all, you need an external sound device, yes. The quality of these, even the cheaper ones, is significantly better than any on-board device.