dodont | (no subject)

(no subject)

Gah, I want an 8-track. With Cubase I get a delay and it makes anything over a single track impossible.

Or I could just get a reel-to-reel tape recorder and do it old skool style. :>

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That sounds like a latency issue. You'll want to get hold of a soundcard/audio interface that will shift the processing off the onboard soundchip and will reduce the delay to a few milliseconds. If you want some suggestions I can point you in the right direction.

i take it you've not seen her laptop :>

regardless, a decent USB box with ASIO drivers can produce some unexpectedly good results on shit hardware! Generally with such a box, I find CPU utilisation levels during recording to be about 5-15% over what they would be otherwise on a dodgy consumer-grade PCI* connected soundcard , but the latency is still sufficiently low to be able to shred (to say hemidemisemiquavers at 140+bpm) on guitar listening only to the output from a VST plugin, done in realtime, while recording.

ASIO drivers are fantastic.

I did mean a specialist audio card with all the bells and whistles such as ASIO, but forgot :)

Nope :)

even the latest laptops with asio driver built in soundcards have crap latency. a dedicated usb or firewire soundcard will give better results.

they range from about £60 to £200 for a cheap one and in this range quality is about proportional to price.

My first one cost about £120 (Edirol UA-25) and was really good (except a bit of hiss on recording but I think that was interference from my laptop) If you get an M-audio one then in theory it will also work with some pro-tools software.

what laptop is it anyway?

the same overheating (usb1) celeron that struggles to play ageofempires2 she's had for years :)

it's down to the drivers on the soundcard. I've got an Edirol (or something like that) usb box which runs with hideous latency using the normal drivers but is really bloody useful with Cubase when using the ASIO drivers.

This is to the point where I can record a raw clean audio track while passing back the same signal going through a couple of VST plugins into the box's outputs, so i can for instance hear a distorted guitar through the Guitar Rig plugin but be recording a clean track. All without noticable latency, and i'm not talking mega laptop either. I've done the same thing even on my old pile of crap. Get a decent soundcard with ASIO drivers and you'll be laughing.

alternatively i could flog you my 8 track digital recorder if you're interested? ;)

also, hardware 8 track records have the added benefit of not having to compete with lots of fan noise, especially when recording quiet guitar and vocal stuff.

i'd recommend giving an app that can use WDM kernel streaming (like reaper) a go. i don't have a fancy sound card as of yet, but using that instead of ASIO has almost removed any latency issues i was having.

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