Audacity Forum

New to Audacity and forums.

I'm using Audacity 1.3.12 beta, Windows XP Pro and a Blue Snowball (USB) microphone. When I'm recoring my voice and have the playback (software) feature turned on, there is a delay. I've read elsewhere in the forums that enabling the hardware playback option in Audacity>Preferences will fix the problem, but I don't have that feature availabe in Audacity.

Is there a fix or workaround where I can record my voice and hear myself at the same time?

Thanks for the help!

cmdarr wrote:I've read elsewhere in the forums that enabling the hardware playback option in Audacity>Preferences will fix the problem, but I don't have that feature availabe in Audacity.

Hardware PlayThrough is only an option on Macs, but it does not help with USB microphones anyway.
(On Windows Audacity defaults to "hardware playthrough" unless you enable "software playthrough").

cmdarr wrote: Is there a fix or workaround where I can record my voice and hear myself at the same time?

Probably not.
Some USB microphones avoid the problem by including a headphone socket on the microphone itself (thus enabling "direct monitoring") but most USB microphones do not have this feature.

Steve just pipped me to answering, but just to add that "Hardware Playthrough" in Audacity for OS X is a hack (that usually has no effect) to make up for the fact that Macs don't support playthrough at all.

The Samson Go is an example of a USB mic that includes an output from which you can hardware monitor with no latency.

Otherwise, the usual answer is to use a hardwired mic. Then with a sound device that supports hardware playthrough (unmuting playback of the mic or line-in) you will get a tolerable delay. There is no guarantee a motherboard computer sound device will actually support hardware playthrough even if the Windows Control Panel has a way to unmute the mic or line-in. In that case you won't hear any playthrough in Audacity until you enable Software Playthrough.




Gale

Thank you for the replies! Very helpful. It sounds like i'm going to need a different mic (if I want to hear playback).

Thanks again for all the help!

Gale Andrews wrote:The Samson Go is an example of a USB mic that includes an output from which you can hardware monitor with no latency.

Several of the Samson USB microphones have a headphone socket for zero latency monitoring - Samson also have short vocal demonstrations of each microphone so that you can hear the difference between them http://www.samsontech.com/products/bran ... ?brandID=2