Hello,
I’ve experianced a few ms delay each time I try to record things in Audacity, which I haven’t been using much because of this problem. I’ve tried recording on top of background music as well as in harmonies with my self on top of each other, but everything gets delayed. I’m using a headset called “Tactic 3D Wrath (wireless)”, which has great sound qualities and all that.
I’d really appreaciate some help as this is a huge problem for me.
Since it appears you’re trying to do overdubbing / sound-on-sound, did you set up Recording Latency in Audacity? That’s the setting which “knows” the mismatch between your live voice and the playback instruments and adjusts the error out.
It’s not automatic. You do have to actually set it through a series of test recordings.
As an example, you create a series of clicks on the timeline and then play that back into your headphones. Then you send the headphone sound directly back into your microphone and record it.
Inspect the two tracks. The timing error value is your correction.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html
I know it’s tempting to go nuts and reduce the error to absolute zero and then complain bitterly when it won’t stay there. Unless you’re messing with an actual Digital Audio Workstation, it don’t stay perfectly correct pass after pass, but it should be good to go. No orchestra or band ever had all the instruments start at the same time.
Koz
Just because I haven’t thrown enough cold water around, how are you listening to the backing tracks? In general, you can’t just listen to the computer. Your live voice will always have a delay/echo to it when it comes back to your headphones. That one’s Computer Delay, and there’s no tuning for that.
When I wrote the original overdubbing tutorial, I purposely included three hardware methods that don’t have the live delay problem. In each case you listen to the Hardware, not the computer. I call those Perfect Overdubbing.
http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/samsonGTrackConnections.jpg
Just thought I’d mention that.
Koz