Recording lag on replay

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

Hey, I’m new to these forums and a novice audacity user. My problem is when I attempt to record my voice over a downloaded backing track ( I record in time to the backing track) the replay, has a slight lag by less than a second which as musicians yourselves, i’m sure you can appreciate is not ideal! Anyone got any suggestions? I’m using audacity 1.3.7 and recording through an onboard microphone on my vista laptop.

Many thanks in advance!

2

The first thing to check is that you do not have “software playthrough” enabled in Preferences.
Have you made many adjustments to the Preferences? If so then we may be best to reset them to the default values and take it from there.

To reset the preferences:
Audacity Preferences are stored in a configuration file called “audacity.cfg” in the Audacity settings folder. The configuration file can be edited with any text editor. The Audacity settings folder is located at:

  • Windows (except Vista) : Documents and SettingsApplication DataAudacity
  • Windows Vista: UsersAppDataRoamingAudacity
  • OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/audacity
  • Linux: ~/.audacity-data

You may need to enable viewing “Hidden files” to find audacity.cfg

To reset preferences to factory settings:

  1. Exit Audacity
  2. Open audacity.cfg in a text editor and remove all the content except the line “NewPrefsInitialized=1”
  3. Save the changes to audacity.cfg and restart Audacity