Audio quality from Laptop to Behringer UMC 404 very poor

  • Thread starter Thread starter cboe
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If you're happy with your work flow and want to stick with it then, of course, that's fair enough,
but, just so you know, you wouldn't need to match anything manually.

That's the whole point of multitrack recording.
You hit record and sing along to your backing track, for example, then when you stop and hit play you hear the backing and singing playing together in time, as recorded.
There may be milliseconds of latency but nothing you're going to be able to hear.

If you have experience of having to manually nudge or move tracks that you've recorded to be in time with the rest then that suggests an issue with your setup which, no doubt, we can help with.
 
@Steenamaroo true, what we do however is use drumeo and then play the e-drums to a version of a song without drums (Think of karaoke but with drums). While technically your solution would work here too, drumeo also shows the sheet music while playing, with a marking where you're currently at in the sheet. I could sing along to a song having just the lyrics, but we're far from good enough to do it with drums. And I'd struggle to remember any full song yet :(.
 
Fair enough. Synchronising regular recording methods with karaoke style prompts probably would be a real pain.
I take your point.

Alright, let's go back to plan A then (or b?). If you can let us hear a clip of the low quality, it might help in diagnosing. (y)
 
Some DAWs (ProTools, Reaper, Vegas Pro) can play video and record new audio tracks alongside it. That would solve the real-time sheet music issue. So you would download the video, load it into the DAW, record your practice performance as a new track while listening to and watching the video playback.
 
cboe said:
I know this is a weird approach, but it worked on the mac and was extremely convenient - losing some quality on the recording of youtube by going through the jack is fine for us. I understand how to record it separately, but it's a pain doing it and synchronizing.
Click to expand...

If it's a Youtube video that you're trying to capture, get this program: Totally free, they keep it up to date, no adware. I've used it for years. Get the URL of the video you want, dump it in the program and it will dload the video and save it. You can load the video into Audacity and save as an MP3/Wav/FLAC, etc. Now you have the audio file you want, no degradation, no wires and plugs, nothing but the audio. Put that into your DAW, and you can add as many extra tracks as you want.

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Can you give me an example of a drumeo track that you would use?
 
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TalismanRich said:
If it's a Youtube video that you're trying to capture, get this program: Totally free, they keep it up to date, no adware. I've used it for years. Get the URL of the video you want, dump it in the program and it will dload the video and save it. You can load the video into Audacity and save as an MP3/Wav/FLAC, etc. Now you have the audio file you want, no degradation, no wires and plugs, nothing but the audio. Put that into your DAW, and you can add as many extra tracks as you want.

Youtube Downloader HD - Download Video for Free

If you are searching for a fast way to download videos from YouTube - use YouTube Downloader HD. Full support for 4K Ultra HD videos and 60FPS YouTube videos.
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Can you give me an example of a drumeo track that you would use?
Click to expand...
Rich, I tried to download that YT recorder and just got one of those blasted .PDF apps! Can you give me a 'clean' link?

Dave.
 
I know i could download the video, the sheet music is not part of youtube however. Of course I could do some screengrab, but again its just much more tedious. Wed love to just click record, start drumeo and then have it all recorded.
 
If you can capture it from Drumeo as a video, you could load it into one of the DAWs I mentioned.
 
Thx @bouldersoundguy i know that would work and its not a huge deal, but the other way was just too convenient ?
 
Convenient is something that just works, and while the idea is ok, your problems are indicative of these things not being simple.
 
I know, just saying that on mac it was very simple ? im willing to use some hardware to fix it but i font have 300$ left
 
Once we hear it, we can comment - but a stereo DI box could work, as it will sort isolation and prevent the DC component, if there, from doing anything destructive to the audio. Personally - I'd have hunted for pair of forgotten about cheap headphones that work on the PC, cut the cable and do the same with the cables going to the interface and experimented to see if I could get decent quality audio from the combination of the 4 wires inside. XLR inputs with their ground and two signal connections often allow you to remove the ground and apply 'random' audio across the pins 2 and 3. I've used this many times in the past as emergency connections - often reduces or removes ground loop style hums, and most preamps have a wide enough gain range to make it work.
 
@rob aylestone @Steenamaroo sry it took so long, we experimented around more, and it turns out its actually not that bad, its just very quiet ? still pretty bad though, cause when we try to bring it up to a proper level quality goes down quite a bit... Is there an easy solution for that??

 

Attachments

Attached is a direct recording of the YT sound done from "the screen" via the 5/6 'loopback' function in my MOTU M4. I then exported it as a 320k top quality MP3.
How does that sound? I cannot see how you could get better quality than that? (I am NO judge but that, IMHO is not a good sample of music upon which to judge sound quality?)

"GIGO" !

Dave. N. B. MP3 is not designed to be reproduced at very high sound levels, especially not low bit crap.
 

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Yeah it is not as bad as we had in our hands, and i know mp3 reduces quality, but its rather quiet compared to the youtube version
 
cboe said:
Yeah it is not as bad as we had in our hands, and i know mp3 reduces quality, but its rather quiet compared to the youtube version
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??! My track is exactly the same amplitude as the YT track, i.e. peaking to -6dBFS. Or as per the screenshot, can be boosted to just under 0dBFS.
Yes, the Behringer interfaces have a very limited line output level (about +6dBu or 1.5V rms iirc) so if you want to drive monitors louder and they are out of gain you will have to add a 10dB or so boost to the outputs.

Dave.
 

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  • Foo in Sam.webp
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If i toggle between the youtube and the mp3, the mp3 100% sounds quieter. By quite a bit. I have not tried downloading and inspecting, but its a clear difference on this device? Odd?
 
rob aylestone said:
If i toggle between the youtube and the mp3, the mp3 100% sounds quieter. By quite a bit. I have not tried downloading and inspecting, but its a clear difference on this device? Odd?
Click to expand...
Hmm? They are comparable to me Rob. I know I am deaf! But I can compare two clips and discern a significant loudness variation.

In any case, it does not matter! The MP3 clip can be at more or less ANY level. If it is at say -20dBFS just normalize it to a sniff under 0dBFS. Or, as I often do for a small boost. just push the master fader in Sam's mixer up a dB or 3 and "Save As".

But, I repeat...you will not get lot of level out of a UMC interface. You also do not want to run it at higher than ~-6dBFS Absolute peak or they get 'scratchy'

Dave.
 
Yeah it's just rather quiet and normalizing should do the trick i guess, which is not too big a hazzle and quality wise should be fine for our needs ? id still be curious why this would happen from a technical standpoint, if anyone has an idea!
 
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