Synch Problems

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

Hi there, I am trying to achieve the simple goal of overdubbing guitar parts and vocals over an acoustic guitar rythm using audacity. I am using an Advent 9515 laptop, plugging my guitar stereo lead directly into the unit’s mic port and listening back via the headphone socket.

When I play the track back, the overdubed parts are completely out of synch with the initial rythm track. I have ensured that the recording starts from the very beginning, point 0. I have also tried setting the project rate to different settings but it makes no difference. Can someone please tell me how to overcome this problem.

Regards,
Joe.

2

The basic problem is that the audio inputs for most laptops are crap and only suitable for simple low quality voice recording with a computer microphone. In most cases, plugging a guitar into a laptop mic input leads to so much distortion that no one notices that it’s out of sync.

You could try using Audacity 1.3.4 and messing around with the latency correction to improve the sync, but it will not help over-all sound quality.