Problem with echo when using microphone

AlamedaTom

New member
Good new and bad news!

First the good news. As an angst-ridden newbie I was really sure that when I installed my new M-Audio Audiophile 192 card, and thereafter installed Cakewalk Home Studio 2, nothing would work right, or worse that my whole computer would crash and burn.

Well, I am elated to report that everything works just peachy except for the "bad" discussed below. I did all of the Cakewalk digital audio tutorials, which were loads of fun. In addition, I used my new Behringer B-1, with ART MP tube amp to record an acoustic guitar track, which really turned out nice.

The bad news is that when I tried to record a second track vocal while listening to the guitar track on headphones, I got a pretty horrible lag between what I was singing into the mic and what I was eventually hearing through the phones. The end recording had no lag between the two tracks, but the vocal of course fell apart because I could not stay with the guitar track hearing my voice in echo.

My phones are plugged into the left main out of the M-Audio 192 breakout.

Today, I tried just arming a digital audio track and talking into the mic, and I got the same echo effect. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong here because my M-Audio literature boasts of no latency, and I am using a 3 ghz processor with lots of memory and disk space. If I can wrestle this last problem to the ground, I will be a happy and satisified camper, but I obviously need some help here. How can I hear the input from my microphone through my earphones in real-time? I need to hear what's coming out of my lips and what what's coming into the phones in the same instant, and that sure ain't happening now!

The solution-bringer will have my undying gratitude.

Tom
 
Never mind. I solved the problem.

I solved my own problem. Plug phones into monitor out on the 192 card. Arm the track to be recorded and then reduce the volume on the live recording track to zero and record. After recording, disarm track and turn the volume back up for playback.

Cool, I'm in business.

Tom
 
Problem not quite solved

Dang. My solution works fine as long as the track I am recording is not the same track(s) playing back while I'm recording. But, if I try to use Cakewalk to punch-in over some mistakes, I get the echo problem again because there is only one track recording and I have to turn up the volume on that track to listen to it at the same time to play along with what has already been recorded. The echo makes it impossible to play or sing along.

I suppose I could just record to a second track and copy portion from the second track to overwrite (punch in) the mistakes in the first track. That works because I can turn off the volume on the second track and play along with the first track, hearing the recorded track 1 and the live instrument being recorded in track 2 (but not the latent output from track 2). But still, I would like to know if I'm doing something wrong here and using a "work-around" instead of the proper methodolgy. See my initial message for a description of my gear and hook-up. Is the "punch in" going to be unusable for me? Any ideas?

Thanks,

Tom :eek:
 
The final solution....

OK, now I've got it. From the Cakewalk Home Studio forum I learned that the problem was that I had "Input Monitoring" enabled! In Cakewalk menus I went to Options/Audio/Input Monitoring and unselected the Audiophile 192 card. Now everything works fine. Thanks for putting up with my whining.

Tom
 
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