Audacity Forum

Hey I need some advice on how I can get my input without any latency. When I turn on the monitor option I get a 20-30 millisecond delay so it makes it impossible to monitor while recording tracks, but if i record with the sound off and play it back its fine and sounds right on time.Need advice on how to make everything sound in sync because my soundcard normally does but with Audacity it doesnt. Appreciate the help. Thanks

With Audacity, you're listening to the whole pathway of input and output processing. The sound card is just shooting a live copy of the input back out to you with no processing.

Welcome to the worst problem of digital audio. It used to be you could pick audio equipment with low distortion specs. Now you have to pay attention to latency ratings, too. If you find a good way around that, get back to us.

Koz

Are you monitoring through Audacity, or through your sound card's drivers? You really should have the sound card set up to handle all the monitoring, Audacity isn't well equipped to do it.

If you're getting 20-30 ms through your sound card directly, that's really lame. If this is the case and you're serious about recording, you should get a nicer card.

Hey well my soundcard outputs everything perfectly and in sync, it is with Audacity when I get the latency issue. I figured there was no true way around this so I just have to record with the sound off, because when playing it back it sounds fine.

I'm still a bit confused.

Are you monitoring the input all the time (even when Audacity isn't running)? Or are you only monitoring when Audacity is running (that is, you have "software playthrough" turned on)?

You seem to be saying that your monitoring latency while Audacity is running is very high. I would expect this to be the case if you have Audacity's "software playthrough" turned on instead of having your sound card drivers set up correctly.

If you can record with low latency (since you say that things sound fine during playback, this seems to be the case), there is no reason you can't also monitor through your drivers without much latency.