Monitoring using USB mic...delay in headphone playback

[captain54]

I have an Audio Technica 2020 usb mic and a Dell, with SB Live 16 stock souncard....

I can record fine, no problems....

the headphone output from the sound card contains a substantial delay....I have
played with all the latency correction and buffer settings to no avail....

I have software playthrough checked, and I'm sure that's why I have latency in the playback...

If I uncheck it and just use hardware playthrough, I get no signal at all out of my headphones..I have
been playing with this for hours

is the answer an external mixer?

[steve]

I have software playthrough checked, and I'm sure that's why I have latency in the playback...

Spot on. Software playthrough is much slower than hardware playthrough, hence the delay.

If I uncheck it and just use hardware playthrough, I get no signal at all out of my headphones......
is the answer an external mixer?

Do you actually need to hear the microphone through the headphones? Many people just adjust the level of what is coming through the headphones so that they can hear themselves singing/playing acoustically.

You should be able to get the other tracks to play through your headphones by selecting your sound card as the playback device in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O" and also selecting "play other tracks while recording new one"

[captain54]

Do you actually need to hear the microphone through the headphones? Many people just adjust the level of what is coming through the headphones so that they can hear themselves singing/playing acoustically.

that's what monitoring is...you hear what you're recording into the microphone thru the headphones.

[steve]

Unfortunately the problem is that you are recording through one hardware device and playing back through another. The two devices are not connected (as they would be if you were both recording and playing back through the same sound card).

Audacity is able to send the audio from the recording source (the USB microphone) through to the playback device (your sound card), but since this is done through software, it takes a noticeable amount of time to get from the input to the output and this is what is causing the delay.

So yes, you can monitor the input, but with a delay which is unavoidable with this kind of hardware (unless your microphone has an analogue audio output).