Noob Alert! - Latency while monitoring during recording

[MJ Slaughter]

I'm using Sonar Producer 6 on WinXP SP3 with an M-Audio Firewire 410. To monitor yourself during recording you have to have the "Input Echo" on to hear through headphones or monitors. This always has a very slight delay making our singer crazy hearing her voice delayed in the phones. Does everyone deal with that or is there a better way? If pros use this software I'm sure their clients don't put up with this annoying echo effect.

 

[Anonymous]

i always shut down the audio engine while recording and do the headphone mix with the mixer - level the recording signal with the returns from the soundcard.

means the recorded signal is amped to the headphone before the pc. this also gives me the opportunity to add any effect without being on the recording later.

 

[MJ Slaughter]

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that out.

 

[mr_fender]

Check your driver settings. I have a M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB interface and use it with Sonar and get practically no latency. Make sure you use the ASIO drivers in Sonar and set your buffer size pretty small for the M-Audio drivers. ASIO drivers give me the best speeds. YMMV. You can also monitor the dry signal directly from the M-Audio for no latency at all. Vocals are always harder for direct monitoring. Your ears are very sensitive to delays when it comes to vocals. With guitar, bass, etc. you can get away with a little bit longer latency and you really won't notice.

 

[MJ Slaughter]

Mr Fender,

In Sonar under audio options I ran the Wave Profiler which I think is supposed to find the best settings for my sound card. I has it set for WDM/KS. Do you think I'd benefit from changing to ASIO?

Currently I'm direct monitoring from the sound card and it takes care of the latency but I'm only hearing the source, voice, in one channel though the rest of the music is in both sides. I'm coming into the sound card on the left channel so I don't expect stereo of course but being able to here from both right and left of the headphones would be nice. I am not using a mixing board. Just mic into the Firewire 410 to the PC.

 

[6L6C]

I thought you might like to take a look at my set up, I can’t use ASIO with my computer not due to the Sonar but due to my machine is a little older and the FSB of the motherboard is a bit to slow or at least IMO. I just monitor direct through the audio interface.

Look at your M-Audio driver you should be able to plug into the left but still monitor left and right through your head phones

 

[MJ Slaughter]

Thanks for showing my your config 6l6C. Mine is similar though my buffers are set at 2 and buffer size is 17.4 msec. Under Driver Profiles all my DMA's are set to 256. In the Sonar help file it recommends using the WDM/KS driver mode if the sound card supports it. I think it's a newer mode than ASIO.

The software driver for my Firewire 410 doesn't have a slider for Direct Monitoring. That would be handy. I guess I should read up on this stuff so I have a better understanding of what the hell I'm doing.

 

[Anonymous]

why don't you use a small mixer for mixing the in-going record signal with the output from sonar?

that will give you zero latency or delay. you can add as many effects to make the recorded player comfortable and later its not in the recording - free for any mix changes

its also good for the cpu - the pc only plays back and doesn't have to calculate the signal through your latency settings.

in this case the soundcard is only playing the already recorded mix, the a/d is used for the input to the recording channel/track.

simple to set up and no latency trouble at all.

 

[nitrous2400]

buffer size normally fixes it, the lower the faster ... then again im not using sonar so go fig :lol: