Audacity Forum

So I've been recording for years with Audacity + my M-Audio MobilePre USB interface on my old XP Desktops and it's worked perfectly. Then I bought a laptop with Vista and every time I tried to record there's be a pretty bad lag when I'm trying to overdub something and it's a pain to manually sync everything myself. Had the beta + latency set to its lowest and everything, but still no good. Well eventually I put XP on the laptop and it worked perfectly.

Well I just got a new desktop with Windows 7 and like 4 gigs of memory, but am getting the latency problem again. I've been advised against just putting XP on this one and really, I don't feel like doing that again anyway. So is there any solution for this or what?

I dunno if I should be taking this to the M-Audio site or something, but figured I'd check here first.

Thanks.

Everybody throws the word "latency" around for every delay and it's a little hard to figure out what's wrong. Are you talking about the delay when you listen to yourself in real time as you play?

Classic latency is you play along to something you recorded last week. You don't listen to yourself and you play in perfect time to the original recording just like you were playing in a club against other performers. Audacity 1.3.12 Latency Compensation is adjusted to make that process come out exactly even -- no time adjustments in post production.

Listening to yourself in real time is much more of a problem and there is no adjustment for that. If I had to guess at it, Windows XP does the headphone monitoring loop in analog-land which has little or no delay, but the quality may not be the best. Windows Vista and Win7, do it in digital-land where the quality is perfect, but there is always some delay.

You can check out the Windows Control Panels. Sometimes you can tune things there. Look for your instrument connection to be selected in the playback panel. If it's already selected, then that's as far as you can go.

Windows Control Panel
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... trol_Panel

There is no overdubbing wiki because getting it to work at all is a pain in the butt, it's way different on different machines, and some computers may not be able to do it at all.

Koz

Thanks for the response.

It's the "classic latency" I'm getting. Just started messing around with the latency correction though (my other computers couldn't handle it going high enough for any actual correction, but this one actually seems to handle it well). There any way to get it to adjust automatically or I just have to mess with it manually until I get something close enough?

Neither one. Steve generated a way to quickly find the value manually, but I can't find it.

In general, you generate a click track (in Audacity 1.3.12). Play the track in overdub mode and record that instead of your live performance. Stop. Play both and zoom into one click. The time difference between the top and bottom tracks is your delay value.

You can do this with live rim shots paying in time with the click track. That's a little harder to inspect because the waves will be different, but you can get the error down to really small values quickly.

Koz

http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... tency_Test

Koz

Don't have a cable or speakers to test that out on where I am right now, but that definitely seems like the solution. Thanks a lot!