Trouble with automation and clipping

[AndreDew]

First I'd like to salute everyone! I'm new to this forum, been lurking around for a while though and I have to say it helped me get going and improve my musical production skills quite a lot. I am still in the noob stage though and that's why I'm going to jump straight in and ask for your help.

First of all let me tell you about the problem I encountered while using automation. For my projects I use a 2.4ghz, 4gb ddr3 Mac Mini, my setup includes a Presonus Firestudio Project interface, an M-audio Oxygen 61(silver) keyboard and Cubase LE4 as my DAW. Lately I've been just messing around with basic lfo basses in Massive and having a go at automating the lfo rate. Problem is, after I'm satisfied with what I've automated, upon playback it never really seems to play the same thing twice. The differences I'm hearing are very very slight, for example a single tiny wobble may be delayed by a few milliseconds, but that's enough to throw the whole thing off and make me mad. Then as I play it again, the one delayed wobble is back to normal, but usually another part of the track will go nuts and so on and so forth. I'm beginning to think that this just happens and I have to live with it, but I do hope there is a reasonable explanation for it.

The clipping problem is quite similar to the automation problem actually. Let's say i'm mixing some tracks, trying to get the highest possible volume without clipping. When I finally think I'm done, I play the thing once, everything seems alright, play it a second time and boom, at a random point in the track I get clipping. Play that part again, clipping isn't there anymore, but other points in the track start clipping. This occurs pretty much randomly and it may or may not always happen, but it usually does. I keep trying to adjust either velocities, individual volumes or the master output, but I don't get why it sometimes plays smoothly and then after playing it several times without changing any settings it starts to clip.

I hope you guys can help me out with this, and I'm sorry if there is another thread about this, quite frankly I didn't know what to search for, so if there is, please point me towards it. Thanks!

[alphacat]

The first one could be a latency issue... not sure about the second one tho.

[erratech]

First one sounds like latency. Second one could be your processor/ram/soundcard trying to do too much at once so it stutters/clips. If you bounce (render down to a wave/aiff file) and playback the resulting file does it still have clipping?