Hey, Moisés!

I'm facing an odd problem during my journey. Following the examples provided in the book (and also writing my own pieces), sometimes the output sound gets heavily disorted as if the sound levels go far beyond the maximum and there's an extreme clipping sound.

I listened to your recording and I agree that sounds like clipping, yes. That's very strange as we would expect those examples tot not do that (I didn't follow that course myself but assume it's been carefully made).

In general clipping is not -in itself- a cause for worry. When we are creating new sounds or working on a piece it is to be expected that we sometimes accidentally clip. We adjust the code and move on. I assume that something about your setup must be different from the setup the author of that example used. That might be comforting to you; I can't see how any of this could indicate that you did something "wrong"... but it is also slightly discomforting because it is so strange.

 

The weirdest part of all this, is that this distortion only occurs when the code is running 'live'. If I use the 'Export' function in miniAudicle, the resulting sound is crystal-clear. I've also used a simple snippet to record the output to a file manually and the same good-sounding result occurs. I tried using another sound interface (as far as I know, the HDMI counts as another audio interface), and an external interface embedded into my Beringher UMA25S MIDI controller with the same results every time.

Thanks for testing that. I wonder whether the "export" function uses some sort of automatic volume scaling. That would prevent the clipping, but then I'd expect that in those caases the normal (non-clipping) sounds would be softer. 
 

Since I don't know how to properly diagnose/solve this problem, I hope some of you can give me some insight to get over this and keep ChucKing :)

 
It is indeed odd and might be a bit hard to diagnose. Could you send me the exact .ck file you used to generate the mp3 file you provided? I'd like to run it and see what happens.

Yours,
Kas.