I use Audacity for recording voice only. I do podcasts. I love the program but I have a problem I cannot solve. When I record myself speaking I cannot simultaneously hear my voice as I am recording it. I get a strange echo and a delay that make it impossible. So I wind up recording with no sound, which is not optimal.
I have played with every setting I can tweak, including the latency settings. No dice. In fact, no matter what number I enter into latency, or latency correction, has NO effect whatsoever on the recording.
<<<So I wind up recording with no sound, which is not optimal.>>>
No, but it’s perfectly normal. Computers are not fun with live production, which is why when you buy sound equipment, the “Latency” value is now a big deal in addition to the other audio quality values in the spec sheet. It’s also the reason big analog audio consoles didn’t immediately vanish when computers came in. One encounter with a digital console will send you right back to the old edit/record suite.
Mess with the two selections Software Playthrough and Hardware Playthrough in…
Preferences > Audio I/O > Stuff Down Near The Bottom. My computer doesn’t support Hardware Playthrough, so that selection isn’t available to me. That’s the only one likely to give you real-time recording foldback. Software Playthrough will never hit “zero” which is the latency value everybody wants.
I use Audacity for recording voice only. I do podcasts. I love the program but I have a problem I cannot solve. When I record myself speaking I cannot simultaneously hear my voice as I am recording it. I get a strange echo and a delay that make it impossible. So I wind up recording with no sound, which is not optimal.
Has this problem (Foldback) been addressed yet - We’re also trying to get foldback through cans and have almost .5sec delay…
Recording vocals with a realtime foldback is critical - I’m wondering if we’re going to have to do it through a premix…
Running a USB Behringer C-1U
There is no direct (hard wired) route from the microphone to the sound card, so foldback can only be done in software, which is much slower than hardware and causes the delay.
Some USB microphones provide a headphone socket on the microphone itself. This gets round the problem as the sound gets from the microphone to the headphones entirely in hardware within the microphone itself.
You may be able to achieve less delay if you record using a program that supports ASIO (ASIO is designed for low latency, but Audacity can not be distributed with ASIO support due to licensing restriction), but there will always be some delay when monitoring through software.
To address your other point, yes, you can monitor by plugging your headphones into an analog mixer which allows monitoring before the computer gets to chew on the sound. Obviously that only works with analog microphones and a computer that will accept a high-level Stereo analog sound signal. Windows laptops generally don’t.
Macs don’t support Hardware Playthrough and I use an external mixer.
This can be a messy surprise to people who assume that you can always do everything inside the computer.
Any time the computer has to stop and think about what it’s doing, it takes time. Software Playthrough is always late. That’s the computer fitting you into its existing processing pipeline. Hardware Playthrough is much handier. That’s when the computer tries to turn around the incoming analog immediately for monitoring. Many computer will not support Hardware Playthrough and those are the computers that don’t lend themselves to becoming Digital Audio Workstations.