Over 2300 For Record Latency Adjustement???

Nate74

HR4FREBR
I've been using Sonar Producer X1 with a Steinberg UR44 on my Windows 7 64-bit PC, for over a year for doing acoustic demos, etc. It works great and I haven't had to touch the "Record Latency Adjust" setting for a long long time.

This weekend, I'm tracking my full band (5 piece, with drums) so borrowed Mackie ONYX 1620 with a firewire card installed so I can have a few more inputs. I was puting the new setup through its paces yesterday and was discovered my overdubbed parts were way out of time. I had been letting Sonar adjust automatically but did a test with a metronome track looped back in and discovered to get the new tracks to sync with the old tracks I had to use a manual offset of over 2300 samples.

I'm using ASIO driver with the driver buffer set for 512. If it matters, the File System for playback and record I/O buffer size are both 256KB.

This seems crazy to me to have to have 2300 samples worth of latency adjustement. What worse, is that if there are more tracks playing, it actually changes. No pluggins yet, just playing back dry tracks.

I guess it won't matter for tracking, but can't see how this is a workable situation for overdubs.

Is there anythign I could be doing wrong with the Firewire settings or something on the ONYX?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide...
 
2300 samples isn't really that big of an offset. If you're recording at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz (which means that there are 44,100 samples per second), then 2300 samples represents a pretty tiny sliver of a second of audio. My arithmetic sucks, but my clumsy division skills come up with about 5ms of latency based on those figures. That's a totally respectable amount of latency. (*edit: it may come out to more like 19 or 20ms of latency. Like I said, my arithmetic sucks...)

Make sure that you're recording the new tracks at the same sample rate as the old tracks. Weird things can happen when mixing sample rates in a project (either slow or fast playback, or high or low pitch changes).

I'd try starting a new project, going to the audio device menu and set the sample rate/bit depth/ASIO buffer size, then import the old tracks into the new project and see if Sonar will resample the .wav files to the current project sample rate. Then try recording overdubs and see if it keeps sync.

Also, 512 samples is kinda big for an ASIO buffer...might bump that down to 128 and see if it causes hiccups or clicks/pops. If it does, then maybe 256 will be a good compromise. But heck, if you're only getting 5ms of latency at 512 samples, maybe just run with that setting.
 
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2300/44,100 = .052, i.e. roughly 5 hundredths of a second, which is 50 milliseconds. Not quite as attractive as 5 milliseconds.
 
2300/44,100 = .052, i.e. roughly 5 hundredths of a second, which is 50 milliseconds. Not quite as attractive as 5 milliseconds.

LOL yeah, it took me like 5 tries to visualize the division correctly. So it's not 5ms, not 19ms, but about 50ms :facepalm:

I'm a computer programmer, I usually let the machines do my arithmetic for me :D
 
Yeah 50ms, seems rediculous. I'll try bumping it down. It just defaulted to 512 when I installed the driver. I guess I'll plan on overdubbing with the Steinberg...
 
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