The CPU is at about 20%, Buffer is at 1024.
Audio Card: Presonus StudioLive16.4.2
WIn7 64bit, 8GB ram. HD 2TB, QuadCore i7-920 CPU.
no extra unneeded programs running in the background, Only Cubase and Plug-Ins (3x Kontakt 4s, Omnisphere, Stylus RMX, EWQLSO, Trillian) inside of it.
What is going on?
I have replaced harddrives because i thought they are bad,
scanned for viruses, trojans etc,
HardDrives aren’t fragmented
Maybe a clock issue?
Maybe. but I only have Presonus StudioLive and midi controller hooked up to the computer, nothing else.
Does the crackling occur when you just play some music through a media player (with Cubase shut)?
No, only in cubase.
and sorry I didn’t mention this but it isn’t constant crackling but occasional sometimes every 5 seconds few crackles or every half a second than no crackling at all for about 15 seconds than again.
Are you running 64 bit Cubase?
32bit. 64bit plugins thru jbridge
Core parking? Sorry to post a Cakewalk thread but it’s a DAW-wide issue;
I hope this helps 
hd softwares (hd tune pro etc) don’t show any harddrive errors.
I’ve also disabled core parking.
Enabled “perfromance mode” in jbridged plugins.
But the crackling/popping still occurs.
Check out “Crackling” at the old Cubase.net web site
Hope this helps
Jack 
Ps: Buffer size or Latency maybe the problem 
I tried from 32 to 4096 buffer size, no luck,
same problem at all buffers
(except at the very low (32-64) buffers audio is stuttering sometimes, but that is normal)
SOS magazine article - PreSonus StudioLive 16:4:2
From this article: Drivers & Latency
Installing the ASIO, WDM and Core Audio drivers is straightforward, and you use the Universal Control utility to adjust the sample rate and various buffer sizes of any PreSonus hardware connected to your computer. You’re also given a very basic DAW program called Capture. No matter how I set the buffer sizes, I couldn’t achieve software monitoring latency below about 24ms (in PC versions of Cubase 5 and Reaper 3, or with Logic 8 on a MacBook Pro). If you’re planning to do all your studio cue-mixing in the Studio Live itself, this may not be a problem, but if you want to use software monitoring (for tape-style automatic input/playback monitor switching, for example), or to play soft synths live, this degree of latency could feel cumbersome.
Universal Control utility
24ms 
wow
My input Latency is 5.896 ms on a Tascam US-1641
TS-12: what does your input Latency say in CUBASE at the moment
Jack
I know I’ll get weird crackles and snaps if I have my wireless card enabled. Annoying, but maybe try disabling certain hardware to see if there’s some unseen conflict? Best of luck!
here i uploaded a short mp3 file of the glitvhing/poppng sound, you can hear the popping sound at :04, :17, :20, :22. I later made the glitching parts louder so you can hear it better:
http://kiwi6.com/file/fr59jimpts
Also, I tried kontakt in standalone, no glitching, so maybe its related to cubase?
Hello,
are you running everthing with one harddrive ?
Cheers,
Chris
Try turning off Multicore processing in the Kontakt vst plugin.
Hippo
Definately sounds like classic example of clock issues. I’ve had exactly this issue when sample and bit rate in sounds card prefs were not exactly the same as the project prefs.
+1 on hikarateboy. My guess also. Clock issues.
i use 2 harddrives: 1) 500gb: Windows, Programs, plugins. 2)2TB: Audio, Samples, Projects.
I tried disabling multiprocessing in Kontakt, and tried disabling multiprocessing in cubase too, tried audio boost and normal.
I have internet and other unused stuff disabled. few hours ago i disabled all non-windows services besides presonus’s universal control.
I tried Kontakt in standalone, no crackling. maybe it’s not kontakt afterall, because I was working on a song and when I added more patches in omnisphere the crackling seemed to happen more often. but maybe it was effecting kontakt somehow… I have also re-installed cubase.
none of this helped.
How can i check or set the clocks?
when I go into “system” directly in presonus studiolive it says “firewire”, when i turn off the computer it goes into 44.1khz, in presonus software “universal control” it is set to 44.1khz, in cubase 44.1khz 16 bit.