[Legion303]

This is very strange. I recorded a bass through my soundcard and it came out fine, except at various places in the recording there are pops like the ones you hear when your CPU is lagging. But when I open the file in a wave editor, I can zoom to the sample level and find no spikes or discontinuity at all. This is a very pure waveform, so any problems should be easy to spot.

I cut out one of the suspect areas and saved it to a new file, and the pop is still there, and still no evidence that there should be one. Does anyone know what could be happening?

[Metal Man]

Turn off software monitoring; turn on direct monitoring if you soundcard allows it.
Or raise your buffer a little ?

[Legion303]

But none of that is the issue.

[PROTO·DOME]

This is absolutely no help at all, but I used to have this way back with high quality MP3s on my old PC.

[Moseph]

I don't know that this helps at all, but I have on occasion zoomed in to sample level to try and fix pops that I could see in the waveform, and the pops remain even after the waveform has been smoothed. So it goes both ways, at least.

[hakstock]

I had a similar issue - for some reasons audio drivers were conflicting with my bluetooth and wireless drivers. Try disabling those if you have them.

[Legion303]

I need to explain this a little better than I did. The problem isn't sound card latency or any of that--I re-recorded the part and it was fine. The problem is that I'm looking at a smooth wave form that has inexplicable noise in it which can't be seen. I snipped out part of the file and listened to it on another computer, ruling out hardware issues.

I think Moseph hit it on the head. For whatever reason, some sound artifacts can't be seen even at the sample level. I'm just curious as to why this is.

[Nutritious]

An example sound clip may help

[Legion303]

http://neutronstar.org/tmp/audiosample.wav

[hakstock]

Don't know how you didn't see it, but there's certain stutter in the wave file, visible on the screenshot here:

http://i41.tinypic.com/13zzbbk.png

Clicks don't necessarily have to be huge bumps - in this case the wave with the jump goes through Fourier transform, and jumps like this one generate higher frequencies, aka the click.

Here's the spectrum of the same section:

http://i44.tinypic.com/u1slx.png