Audacity Forum

Hey guys. So I wanted to do a cover of the song Broken by Seether. For that, I need 2 tracks. A guitar track and a vocal track.
I did the guitar track and it is just fine. Then I try to do the vocal part over the guitar track (I have the "Play while recording option" ticked, well its impossible to record otherwise anyway). I sing the whole song perfectly in time while listening to the guitar backing track I've made, but when I play it, now this is where things get tricky.
For the first few seconds it's fine. But as time passes, the vocal part slowly drifts back (visually). What this means is that the vocal part plays faster than the guitar part, whereas when I recorded them they were both in time.

Some say that it's just that the first track is slowing down. I don't know, but the result is the same. The second track (vocal) sounds off, it plays too early. Nearing the end, it's almost 1 second earlier than the guitar track, which is horrible =/

Thanks a lot in advance.

This sort of thing can happen with cheap sound cards that are inexpensive and don't cost very much. The electrical characteristics of your sound card are different between capture and playback. So the 44100 show is recorded at 44098 and played back at 44102. Over time, Real Life and the captured performance will drift apart from each other.

You may easily find that if you capture exactly a one minute show, it will not only be off on playback, but have yet a third error on your mom's computer.

Koz

I had the same issue recording vocals with a backing track. Since I didn't have time to go out and upgrade my soundcard, I came up with a temporary albeit cumbersome solution that worked perfectly.

1. Record or create first track.
2. Covert to MP3 file and transfer to mp3 player (no latency issues)
3. On a separate file, record next track while listening to MP3 file through the player.
4. Copy and paste 2nd track to the first track file and align.
5. Covert tracks 1&2 to MP3 file...etc...

It's a pain, but it works short-term, or long-term if you don't mind the hassle.

To overcome the issue long-term...what sound cards would work best?

James