New USB sound but cant hear it

[pat marcus]

Im sure this has been asnswered before, great Gods of Audacity but here's my dilemma.

Just upgraded my 1.3 beta to lovely new 1.37 and at the same time upgraded my sound system from one that uses the PC line-out to drive an amp and speakers, to a USB device (Bose Comapnion 5)..which is rather more wife-friendly.
Two issues :
1. Now, I can only hear the sound when "record" is pressed in audacity. This is a real nuisance as I cant cue tracks before recording. Swiitching on/off playthrough doesnt help if its not recording
2. There's an annoying audible delay between the source (turntable thru phono stage) and the recording. This doesnt affect the recording but makes adding turntable effects difficult.

What do I need to do ?

[waxcylinder]

1. Now, I can only hear the sound when "record" is pressed in audacity. This is a real nuisance as I cant cue tracks before recording. Swiitching on/off playthrough doesnt help if its not recording

There is a poorly documented feature of Audacity that enables you to monitor prior to recording. To activate it, simply click once in the record meter toolbar (clicling in there again while monitoring will turn monitoring off). And note tthat unless a signal is present there will be no visual cue to indicate that metering is on. Enhancements to this have been requested previously in the Feature requests.

Note, too, that while recording - clicking in the recording meter bar will reset the max levels indicators.

2. There's an annoying audible delay between the source (turntable thru phono stage) and the recording. This doesnt affect the recording but makes adding turntable effects difficult.

It's called latency, and it's down to the time the signal takes to travel through the processors on your USB soundcard and your computer. If your soundcard has input monitoring you could try monitoring from the soundcard.

WC

[pat marcus]

Thanks so much WC. I`ll try that tonight. I spent ages playing with the mixer built into the Nvidia sound chipset on the computer to see if that made a diference but it simply introduced lots of extra gain and didnt solve the problem. I guess I`ll have to be careful I dont mess up my levels every time I click it.
I see there are latency controls in the new version. I was too scared to mess with them. Will they help me ?

[kozikowski]

<<<Will they help me ?>>>

Latency controls affect how late or early the machine plays back already recorded performances to you so you an play along with them live and not have echos in the final show.

Doesn't help you a bit.

Nobody posted this yet. This is the Audacity wiki about the Windows Control Panel.

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

Koz

[pat marcus]

Thanks both

The "clicking in the level meters" function works superbly. I now notice there's also a drop down for turning monitoring off and on which does the same thing. Thanks very much.

Both the requirement to use this function and the aforementioned delay appear to be a symptom of now using a USB sound device for output. Starting to wonder if I've gone the right way.

Ive also started to notice a base (not bass) level of distortion or hash that I can hear in the background and is ever present. Now Im not sure if the better speakers are revealing this and its always been there or whether it is again, somehow a side effect of the USB device. You only notice it when the gain on "stereo mix is right down. As soon as you increase that, its drowned out by the music....but you still know its there. Given that I am archiving vinyl using a modded deck, expensive phono stage and recording at 48 or 96k, added hash is not desirable.

I`ll do some further checking tonight to try and isolate whether this is coming from the turntable, phono stage or software and whether its getting recorded. More questions inevitably to follow. Unless anyone's got any ideas........?
Incidentally, I also tried selecting the line-in input on the mixer as an alternative to stereo. It seems to operate at 3 or 4 times the gain level of stereo mix and is unusable on 12" vinyl as it just overloads, instantly.

[pat marcus]

OK. Its not the turntable or phono stage. In fact what Im hearing IS a low level of distortion that seems to be introduced by the high gain of 12" vinyl. So, with stereo mix on min and just enough output to be able to hear, what you get is the sound of the track being playedbut horribly distorted and fuzzy. When you turn the gain up further you cant hear it, because what you then hear is the music for the music itself, which in turn doesnt always sound distorted. Im now very confused. Help.

[pat marcus]

This is really a new question now so I`ll post separately.