Sound glitching/cracking ; PC's fault or usb sound card?

I recently bought a USB sound card off online. I have using a condenser microphone connected to the usb sound card into my computer. I tried recording with it in FL Studio 12, and I had some issues, when I try to make the buffer size lower, the playback and the application goes mad, and I cannot hear a damn thing besides cracking/static or some sh*t like that I cannot explain. But when I set the buffer size higher, the cracking/static noise reduces but it is still sometimes perceptible when I play back the recording or when recording.

Is it my PC or my usb sound card? Trying to make sure.

My specs:

-AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @2.6 GHz
-4GB RAM
-Radeon HD 3000 integrated graphics

(note: my PC is like 10 years old and up and it malfunctions from time to time, it gets repaired whenever required but in my experience this PC is nearly wrecked.)
 

UnholyVision

Active Member
My specs:

-AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @2.6 GHz
-4GB RAM
-Radeon HD 3000 integrated graphics
I know this is old, but I figure I can jump in too. Sound is one of my hobbies per se.

You're probably putting to much load onto your system. Your systems CPU isn't the strongest so when you probably should play around with settings trying to take a bit of power off your CPU/RAM. Lower sample rates if possible and various other tweaks to lower the impact.

Also, check to see what the specs of your sound card are. Some DAC/AMPs can't do some bit/sample rates leading in issues with crackling. For example, it could do 44100hz at 16bits but not 24bits. Yet the system is set to output at 24 and you're experiencing issues.

Does the device have drivers? (Considering you're calling it a sound card). Try a different model or possibly a basic realtek driver since a lot of those sound cards use simple Realtek hardware.
 
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