Delay Between Cursor and Audio

[Joachim]

Hello,

I have a technical question:

irrespective of the version of Audacity and the sound processor I'm using, there is a remarkable delay between the position of the cursor in the track and the audio played back. Audio is delayed around 300 ms. You can see this very clear with a track of ticks (created for example with Click Track finished ...). When you hear the tick the cursor has passed the tick 300 ms before. This is bothersome when for example searching cracks in a vinyl track by listening to the audio and stopping playback at a crack with the P-key. When using a high time resolution for the track the crack is outside the visible part of the track. Is there any possibility to sync the audio and the cursor?

The very old program CoolEdit96 shows, that there must be a technical solution for the problem. In this application audio and cursor are perfectly synchronized. Even on the old and slow computer I used 6 years ago. So, may be, my question is more a suggestion for a future release of Audacity?

In the moment I am using Audacity 1.3.4-beta (Unicode) under Windows XP Service Pack 2. Processor is a Mobile Intel Pentium 3 GHz with 2 Gbyte RAM. Sound processor is either the internal Realtec AC97 or external Behringer FCA202 both with standard Windows Drivers.

Joachim

[steve]

I don't get that problem.
My system:
Pentium III 500MHz
SoundBlaster Live Value
TNT2 video card
Win XP Pro SP2
Direct X 9c

What do you have the "audio buffers" set to in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O"?
What results do you get from running the "Benchmark" from the Help menu?
How many tracks of audio are you running?

(An easier way to find clicks in a vinyl recording is to change the view to "Spectrum" - Click on the little down arrow next to the track name. Clicks show up as vertical lines.)

[Joachim]

Hello stevethefiddle,

Buffer settings are:

Audio to Buffer: 100 ms
Latency Correction: 0 ms

This are the default values. I have clanged them without any result.

Here the Results of the benchmark:

Using 63310 chunks of 265 samples each, for a total of 32,0 MB.
Preparing...
Performing 100 edits...
Time to perform 100 edits: 13266 ms
Doing correctness check...
Passed correctness check!
Time to check all data: 47 ms
Reading data again...
Time to check all data (2): 31 ms
At 44100 Hz, 16-bits per sample, the estimated number of
simultaneous tracks that could be played at once: 12272,1

I'm running only one stereo track.

Joachim

[steve]

Sorry, I don't know. From your specs there should be no problem at all, but clearly something is slowing it down.