latency problem

[chipw]

New user here - just installed the latest beta version. I have a SB Audigy 2 ZS sound card, I have my acoustic guitar plugged into a pre-amp, then into the line-in on the card. I hear the guitar in the PC speakers. In Audacity the guitar comes through just fine, I can record live from the guitar. So far so good. Problem is I can't get the latency corrected. I've played with the two latency settings and I always have a full second of latency no matter what I set them to. Even going so far as setting them to 0 and -10000, is no different than 100 and 0, or any other numbers. Always a full second of delay. This is unusable for recording multitracks from my guitars and mic'ed sax'es. Any idea how to fix this problem?

[steve]

Go into "Preferences" from the Edit menu and go to the "Audio I/O" tab.

Switch off (de-select) "software playthrough".
If you can no longer hear your input, go back to the SB Mixer/Control Panel and enable the playback volume for the Line input.

Back to the "Audio I/O tab in Audacity Preferences and set it back to the default (100 milliseconds buffer, 0 milliseconds correction).

Now test the latency and adjust the latency correction as required.

A good way to set up latency correction is to generate a click track in a new project, then play back that track and record it on another track - adjust the latency correction and "Undo" the recording. Repeat until you can record the click track and have the recording in sync with the original track.