Topic: track monitoring

Hi!

I think I understand what you’re talking about. I can do that because I have the knob on my interface that lets me monitor my guitar directly thru my interface or thru the software, as you say (or mix those two).

Now, I wouldn’t like to do that for many reasons: I couldn’t hear the metronome or/and music. If I wanted to record my guitar directly thru instrument in, I would have to listen to the sound of guitar pickups ….. and if I turned it halfway, I would still hear guitar both directly thru the interface and the software. Btw, you can put an eq or any other plugin and turn the volume down, mute the output that way and still record whatever you want to and it doesn’t add more latency. That doesn’t solve the problem either, because you’re recording with the latency that already exists (you only can’t hear it).

I don’t really know if this helps, since I don’t know what interface you use and what you want to record (I don’t even understand how you manage to hear your instrument both directly thru your interface and Podium if you don’t have the control I described). Anyways, the right way to do things would be to do everything inside Podium and try to lower the latency as much as possible.

I hope this helps, somehow (I even hope that I didn’t understand your question correctly )

Cheers

O.K. It’s clear now.

I have both Podcast Factory and Fast Track (that’s the same interface, actually). I see that you have a powerful machine and I must tell you I’ve never had any latency problems with 2 gigs single core processor and 1.5 gigs of RAM (I’m getting myself the new machine with similar specs like yours soon :D). I’m telling you this because it seems that your interface is not the problem. I had a whole lotta problems with M-Audio Asio drivers, though (not latency issues but clicks and crackles and such). Currently, I use M-audio usb Asio and buffer size is 512 samples (I could get away with 256, but I have no need to do that). However, it started making problems recently:

http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2968

So, it’s a good idea to always have asio4all installed.

@corrupt wrote:

After playing back a few times and recording a few tracks I also find that the audio suddenly becomes extremely distorted. Closing and reopening Podium and continuing with the same settings seems to temporarily resolve the issue…

That could be the driver issue. Reinstalling helps sometimes, but you could also check if the same thing happens with asio4all.

http://www.asio4all.com/

I still use 2.10, but everybody says that the new beta works fine.

The lack of multiprocessing could be the answer, but you will have to wait for someone else to confirm or deny that.

Again, I must tell you that simple vst plugs bring no latency (1 sample, maybe), but that’s not the way to solve this problem (not a good one).

Anyway, you’ll see there’s a few people in this forum who know a lot about many things and are willing to help, and I expect some of them to come up with some explanation, soon.

Cheers

P.S. Even though M audio Fast Track is a great budget audio interface (you’ll never need anything better at home for mixing and recording using instrument in or balanced line in), if you want to record using a mic, it would be good to get a really good mic preamp(s), and a really good mic(s) (those two things are really, really important). That does’t mean that you can’t use Fast Track for that task, but you mentioned you was gonna pick another device .

edited to add:

Not everything have to be ridiculously expensive – when we’re talking dynamic mics, the good old 57 is still a must have mic in every serious recording studio, and not only because of its price (about $100) 😉

First of all, I note that no matter how nice your machines, it appears everyone here is using Podium on a single CPU core, which is just asking for trouble. Do I understand correctly that one PC is a monster quad-core i7 and is being used with the free version of Podium? That’s a little like driving a Rolls on a muddy footpath in a moor.

I don’t know the status of brand new M-Audio interfaces but they used to be crap. Same with many other makes under, say, $300 and more than a year or two old. I use mainly ASIO4ALL right now and get anywhere from 12 to 16 ms of latency, depending on how many plugins on the given track. My interfaces are both Digitech units, and using the Digtech ASIO driver I can get latency down to 5 ms, and I would use that driver more accept it doesn’t like to ‘let go’ sometimes when I shut things down or make major changes.

At 20 ms latency, you will hear a chorusing effect that gets worse as latency goes up from there. This would probably not be a huge issue on slow passages, but on highly syncopated and fast parts it could be a real problem. Up higher and you start to hear true doubling — you can basically forget recording in the doubling region. Under 7 ms is the zone only some experienced audio engineers claim they can hear but the average person cannot. I find the range from 7 to 18 ms or so to be managable in most cases. I notice none of you are reporting your actual latencies. I also suspect that some of you aren’t aware of how to measure true latency properly. Most DAWs only report what they see — totally an ITB number.

You can have the ballsiest PC on your block, but if you have DPC and ISR latency issues with your kernel, you are dead in the water before you even get started. Have you all tested your machines with the DPC Latency Checker?

@corrupt wrote:

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this has been asked many times before… How do I turn off audio monitoring for a track that I am currently recording?

Hi,

If you’re using the latest Podium Free 2.42 version, then it should be possible by bypassing the input mapping on the track. Podium 2.37 had this new feature:

“The input bypass button has been changed to only disable monitoring instead of disabling recording. An audio input that is monitored through external hardware can thus be silenced in the Podium mixer during recording.”

Other related recording related features were also introduced in 2.37:
http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2431