I’ve noticed a rather strange phenomenon using Blender CVS, recently.
I’ve been blending while listening to music, and I have a lead plugged into my headphones jack that goes to my stereo, to bypass my rather tinny laptop speakers. It might also be worth noting that the headphone jack is quite near the touchpad of my laptop.
As I drag nodes around the node window, sometimes the speakers hiss and crackle, quite audibly. This is very strange, because dragging around in other programs or Windows doesn’t do this. Nor does dragging other things in Blender, such as changing colour values.
Any idea why this could be? It’s quite strange - you’d’ve thought that if the touchpad was interfering with the jack, it would do it all the time!
K, this is the single most unique problem I’ve ever seen in Blender General.
That said, Creative sound cards, especially the Audigy series, have known driver issues with crackling when the CPU is under stress. There is no solution, but some pro’s go so far as to suggest plugging your speakers into a different outlet than your computer. They also suggest turning your sound down in the software to below half and manually turing up your speakers.
It seems to me that moving nodes is CPU intensive for whatever reason and it’s effecting the same port that your soundcard is on… for whatever reason.
The best fix for my Audigy was to use 3rd party drivers, the KX Project has excellent ones that are awesome for music and movies, but don’t support EAX which is crucial for gaming.
If it’s not a huge deal then I wouldn’t bother too much. I actually bought a new sound card myself, but my problem was more widespread.
Edit: Because you’re on a laptop, this problem could be just about anything including alien j-band emissions to having your speaker jack laying on a paperclip. Good luck.
