Topic: A bit of trouble with my guitar

If you enable the “show latency information” option in the mixer, you can verify what your latency is in samples and milliseconds. An ASIO buffer size of 2048 will give a fairly noticeable delay when monitoring direct. It’s also possible that some plugins (typically compressors) add additional latency. If your PC can’t handle lower buffer sizes with ASIO4ALL, then you may get better performance with a dedicated soundcard that has a native ASIO driver.

Thanks for adding certain details, Infinitoar. I couldn’t say more earlier but this is what I had guessed.

First, about the cable. you can use pretty much any coaxial cable (this shields against hum), and it can be at least 18 to 20 feet long before you start to loose high frequencies due to the change in capacitance the extra length beyond 20 will cause. Of course, for pickups that are too trebly or bright, some prefer super-long length. Hendrix used those totally cheapo curly cords because they have ridiculously high capacitance and this shifted his guitar down into more pleasing mids through those Marshall stacks. Yes, lovely.

Now on to the most important bits. I had suspected you were running in direct via your line in (which is a line level input, usually set at -20 dB on most gadgets). Here is the beginning of your huge latency problem. Line in may be better for latency than trying to run direct via a normal mic jack, but ultimately no matter what you do you will probably never get that latency down enough to be in sync with previously recorded tracks or allow you to monitor yourself in real time when you play.

The biggest and first fix is that you need an INTERFACE for your guitar. Among things, like providing (almost always) its own dedicated ASIO, it will convert your analog guitar signal to digital rather than forcing your PC to do it, which takes time and work, thus the beginnings of that huge latency.

There are now a zillion interfaces out there and more every day and at all price points. New Egg is considered a decent vendor, but other than that I can’t comment on the product kits you are looking at, except to say I am usually wary of bundled offerings. They often include one good item with a lot of cheap stuff. Just be sure any interface is super sturdy — beware of cheapo plastic jacks on it and flimsy controls. Best advice is to read every review of it on the web from Harmony Central, forums, anywhere your search takes you. It’s nearly impossible to try any before you buy. I read all reviews at places like Musician’s Friend before I decide. I’ve seen interfaces as low as $33, but those are commonly the ones with the plastic knobs or only work for a couple of months, etc. PreSonus stuff usually gets pretty good reviews — they are no newcomer. Many items these days also come bundled with various software. At least they can’t force yo to use it if you like something else you’re using more!

Your direct line in deal is why you have to set at 2048 samples just to get a healthy signal to the track. Having an external A/D interface with its own driver will radically help you with that.

I did some experimenting with ASIO4ALL’s control panel. I have a RealtekHD soundcard, too, and my testing experience showed that the sliders and click boxes on the right didn’t seem to change anything. At least this ASIO works with Realtek, because there’s a whole list of others that it won’t. I wouldn’t waste a lot of money changing the soundcard, since I find Realtek is good enough for Podium and some other DAWs, too.

On your Arrangement page, go to your mixer display. As Frits said, enable the latencies to display at very bottom of mixer channels. In fact, right click all over to fine tune and set your meters and faders to monitor exactly what you want. One thing I love about Podium is how much you can control what the channel mixers (and master) will monitor. Can’t recall exactly where you click to display latencies, but it is there somewhere. This will show you exactly what Podium is seeing on each channel.

I hope this explains things better now, Heavy sampling can get you a more sturdy signal without the pops and clicks, but it makes your CPU work very hard. It’s a trade-off situation. Just knowing what the deal is can be more than half the solution sometimes.

@The Telenator wrote:

…Line in may be better for latency than trying to run direct via a normal mic jack, but ultimately no matter what you do you will probably never get that latency down enough to be in sync with previously recorded tracks or allow you to monitor yourself in real time when you play…

HILLARIOUS

🙄

would you care to proof this theory? why give advice when you don’t know the basics?

if you’re looking for a “guitar only” interface you could have a look at the Behringer stuff :
http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCG102-Guitar-to-USB-Interface/dp/B000PAPO9W

or IKM Stealth plug :
http://ikmultimedia.com/stealthplug/features/

… they sport dedicated ASIO drivers and should you get there

if you get the PreSonus box you would face same latency on either input btw…

@The Telenator wrote:

You want me to “proof” [sic] it for you, michi? Really? Okay.

The MIC IN is really no different than the imput of a guitar amp. It can be anywhere from 50 to, oh, about 80mV — that’s millivolts. Fortunately, PCs work at very low voltage, but you still need to alter the signal to whatever level the computer wants to see. Add a treble boost or other boost, such as a distortion box, into the chain and who knows what voltage we are then dealing with! So, aside from the PC having to deal with conversion of an analog signal into digital, there are now potentially heavy voltage issues for it to deal with. More work.

Now, in the case of a LINE IN, we are usually dealing with a -20dB jack or a similar animal. Guitar amps often have these in the form of a line in to send a preamp signal from another amp into the amp with line in, direct to the power amp stage and/or a send/return loop for effects or other uses. These are normally hotter, somewhat more balanced affairs. It’s not as heavily affected by some fuzz box added to the chain. This also explains why putting the common floor pedal effect into the send/returns loop without a “volume” adjustment or line level control as were common on earlier amps, will overload that device, creating bizarre results — unwanted distortion, popping sounds, and possibly even frying the effect pedal.

Again, the PC will have to deal with voltage issues from a line in, but ideally, since the line in’s value is set by the PC designer, it should be a value that the PC wants to “see.” No guarantees, of course, but theoretically this is supposed to be what happens. Therefore, by using line in, infinitoar should be bypassing at least one stage of signal modification. There’s simply no telling what is destined for a Mic In signal (volume mixer, voice or music enhancement, EQ, who knows?) without looking at his computer’s specs, but it is safe to assume that line is should be more direct. That’s why it’s called a “line in,” michi.

The whole point is that the more processing and signal shaping required, the more work a PC has to do — a real no brainer. Does it also mean lower latency for line in? Again, who knows, but, yes, maybe. Read my posts more carefully: That’s why I stated, “Line in may be better for lower latency,” as opposed to a mic in. Perhaps you missed that disclaimer in my post — I said, MAY — but all of this is worth explaining anyway. HILARIOUS? Yes, in the sense that I would have assumed you were already familiar with how all this stuff works. I normally only need to explain things like this to folks who are pretty new to digital recording. Weren’t you the user in that other thread that was getting Podium’s “Mix” metering numbers at the bottom right corner of Arranger view confused with the PC’s CPU rate?

ah, now it’s clear – but how does procesing a line input differ from processing a mic input in terms of latency given approriate jacks on the very same sound card???
i really like the way you get pissed 😆 😆 😆

A Line In differs as I was saying before because it is a “line level” input. Ideally, all sound processing on a PC should be handled digitally, but it’s not always and not on all computers. Mic inputs require some sort of preamping of the signal at the very least. A line input “expects” the signal to already have it. A line input should go straight to the soundcard.

One comparison we can try is to plug into the regular guitar input with an instrument — ok, fine — sounds like a normal guitar. Then go around and plug into the amp’s Line In or Power Amp In (same thing on some amps). I’m talking figuratively here because of the slight chance of a moderate shock if there’s something screwy with the amp, so I’m not literally suggesting we do it! Anyhow, we’d be lucky to hear anything at all. Of course, PCs are not guitar amps but the principle is essentially the same. Still, plug into a line in on a PC, we may have to crank all volume controls to hear any kind of decent signal. Some PCs have things like background noise cancelation and whatnot on the mic input that may preceed the digital processing of the input sound — perhaps a “dimmer” or a mute switch. These, being such basic electrical duties, need not be handled by the digital processing.

I had to go wade through that long and painful other thread to decypher who said what. I believe it was your brother in arms over there who got mixed up (as many do with Podium’s unique Mix meter function) over CPU percentage vs. Mix (podium’s own internal processing, files, loading, etc.) So I stand corrected. In your case, however, we were asking repeatedly for your PC specs in trying to assist you. Next, I was supposedly patronizing you or something. Note in this thread how the OP provided tons of details and we identified the issue immediately.

Finally, I’ve always dreamed of a day when we could merely plug any regular electronic instrument into a PC and just GO! without all this junk strung inbetween. But, of course, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

@infinitoar : you do realize that i included 2 suggestions for usefull gadgets, do you?
and i still stand my ground that there is no difference in latency between a mic and a line in on the very same soundcard ( preamping the mic signal is not done by your computers cpu but some electronics onboard of the soundcard )…
in fact it’s this Telenator dude trolling around and accusing wrong people …

@Infinitoar wrote:

I don’t even know the real reason “why”, when DDR RAM is cheap, DDR3 is cheap and DDR2 is HIGH, makes no sense to me whatsoever. Maybe there’s some secret with DDR2, who knows.

I’m afraid this is all I can respond to at this point. There’s no mystery, and it comes right back to basic economics; supply and demand.

DDR2 is old tech. There’s still plenty of it around, but many people are less likely to add more DDR2 RAM to their aging systems, and more likely to buy new systems. DDR3 is, and has been, the main RAM used in systems for years, and it makes no sense to manufacture tons of the stuff. This means that it’s more expensive to produce, as most places produce DDR3 now. Higher production costs and less market interest means that it makes perfect sense for DDR2 to be expensive, especially more than DDR3, which at the moment is being eaten up easily, possibly even greedily with modern systems that can take 16gb or more (leaving aside whether or not most people actually need that or not).

I hope that explains it.