Can't connect my keyboard to my computer

[pianoman56069]

I am unable to connect my Yamaha keyboard to Audacity with a USB cable. Right now I am hooking the keyboard output to my computer's mic port, which is a mini-plug. How can i get Audacity to recognize my keyboard when its connected via USB?? Also, there is at a 1second lag or greater from the time I press a key on my piano to the time Audacity recognizes it and records it/lets me hear it through my head phones.

[kozikowski]

Let's take the USB first. Unless you have the one oddball keyboard in the world, the USB is to connect the control and keypresses between the computer and the keyboard, not the music. That's MIDI. You run a program on your computer that presses the keys on your keyboard through the USB cable. The keyboard makes the music. The actual music never goes between the two.

<<<Right now I am hooking the keyboard output to my computer's mic port, which is a mini-plug.>>>

It's worse than that. The keyboard headphone is Stereo and the computer Mic-In is Mono. Any music you produce in stereo is going to be half-gone.

If it gets there at all. The Mic-In is a very sensitive connection because it's designed to plug a very low level microphone in and boost it. The Keyboard doesn't need boosting, so most people find the performances are distorted, harsh or crunchy.

So you own two devices that are, for most practical purposes, completely incompatible with each other.

You can bridge the gap with any of the fine External USB Sound Cards out there.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

Or make friends with somebody who owns a Mac. Macs and your keyboard will directly plug into each other. That's how I did the music tests on my web site.

You can use a deskside Windows machine, too, but nobody has those any more.

Koz

[pianoman56069]

OK. Strangely enough the quality is quite good, the lag is really the only problem.

[kozikowski]

You are listening to your computer process the music, although one second or longer is too long for straight latency (its official name). Do you get your hard drive light flashing a lot between the time you press the button and the sound comes back out? Pay attention to that next time.

Performer monitoring is handled by two different Audacity preferences: Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O > Software Playthrough and Hardware Playthrough. Those actual names may change between the Audacity versions. Choose the one with the least damage. You may need to restart Audacity between settings.

This is a slightly different but related problem to the delays you get when you try to sing to yourself. It goes in in perfect time, but comes out off-rhythm. You'll get that later.

It pays handsomely to find out how full your hard drive is and figure out when the last time you defragmented it. You get bad delay problems like this on a slow, underpowered computer.

Koz