How do I activate direct monitoring on my SB X-FI FATAL1TY?

[Messias]

Hello!

I'm having delay in my audacity. I found this information about how to fix the problem:

There's 3 kinds of monitoring you can do,
1) realtime monitoring through an external mixer,
2) hardware monitoring through a soundcard that supports direct monitoring
3) software monitoring, where you have to wait for your computer to process it

My soundcard supports direct monitoring, so does this mean that I can be free of delays?
How do I start using direct monotoring in my soundcard?

Thanks for your help!

[steve]

Audacity on Windows offers two options for monitoring: hardware/software
The default is "hardware" but will be overridden if you go into Edit menu > Preferences > Audio I/O and select "software playthrough" (so don't )

There will still be a short delay (latency) while audio makes short journey between sound card and hard drive, but with single track recording this will be sufficiently small to not be a problem. If you are doing multi-rack recording and find that your tracks are slightly out of synch, then you can upgrade to Audacity 1.3 which allows to to manually adjust the "latency correction" so that multiple tracks line up more accurately.

[Messias]

Audacity on Windows offers two options for monitoring: hardware/software
The default is "hardware" but will be overridden if you go into Edit menu > Preferences > Audio I/O and select "software playthrough" (so don't )

There will still be a short delay (latency) while audio makes short journey between sound card and hard drive, but with single track recording this will be sufficiently small to not be a problem. If you are doing multi-rack recording and find that your tracks are slightly out of synch, then you can upgrade to Audacity 1.3 which allows to to manually adjust the "latency correction" so that multiple tracks line up more accurately.

Okay! now I've fixed this by adjusting in "latency correction" in Audacity 1.3. My question now is: Will the delay always be the same or will it increase the more tracks I add? If so it will be unsynchronised again..

[steve]

As long as the internal clock in the sound card is stable, the latency should remain pretty constant (up to the point where your system gets close to its limits).