Audacity Forum

Software Playthrough is slow compared to hardware routing, so there will always be a delay and you can't do anything about that.
Why do you need to use software playthrough?

You are hearing the software playthrough delay, and the only solution is to use hardware playthrough, if you sound card supports that. Alternatively you can turn software playthrough off and just listen to the live sound of the guitar in the room.

-- Bill

... buggy ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/566381?comments=all ) but works on my machine most of the time. If I get that delay problem I just restart PulseAudio.

Probably because you have "software playthrough" enabled.
if you provide more information about your set-up we can probably help further.

... track using audacity while listening to the other track, the sound which my mic is picking up is relaying back to me with about a half second delay, looking for a solution to this problem and btw i have windows seven :) thanks kev It's generally better to start a new topic for each new question ...

... If that's wrong, no doubt someone will correct me. If you enable "software playthrough" in the Audacity Transport Menu you can hear a delayed copy of what you are recording while the recording is being made. To get less delay when monitoring the recording you can instead try unmuting ...

... playback, try the obvious answer - Transport > Software Playthrough in Audacity. That sends a copy of the input to the output. The output will be delayed because of the time it takes to process through the computer. If you don't like the delay, try unmuting the input on the Playback tab of Sound ...

... Playthrough in Audacity, or (2) try unmuting the input in the "Sound playback" section of Sounds and Audio Devices. (1) will have a delay, (2) if it works will have much less delay. Choosing Windows DirectSound as the method to access the sound device should give you a bit less delay ...

Avast should not be a problem - I run it on my Windows XP machine and it does not interfere with Audacity. 1-2 seconds delay sounds excessive, but it is not uncommon on Windows machines to have 0.5 to 1 second delay when using software playthrough from a USB device with Audacity 1.3.x. ...

We need to stop throwing around the term "Latency" as if it were a single item. The delay between the playback track and the recorded track is settable with the 'latency' control within Audacity and there have been postings on how to reduce that error to smallest ...