Faster CPU or more RAM???

[solo2racr]

Can I comment on this because I'm a bad guy? ripping CD's is software intensive, never does the audio signal pass through your audio card when ripping CDs

get that 24/96 and all your troubles will be over my friend. I look forward to seeing you posting mixes in the Clinic.....then I can start ripping on your room acoustics

Best of luck with everything,

Alex

Agreed, Ripping CD's onto a hard drive doesn't involve a sound card at all. Playing them back, on the other hand does That was my original purpose for getting the SB card. The onboard sound REALLY sucks

FYI........I can't wait till I have something to post so you (and everyone else) can rip it and me apart How else can you learn?????

 

[sloom]

Well, it's another happy ending here on Homerecording's forum! This has been an informative thread, not to mention shamefully entertaining o). Glad it ended well- and I picked up a little helpful info myself, concerning latency buffers.

I'm another one who's struggled for 5 years with my system, as time allows with family and worrrrrrrk, and I'm getting it down finally- FWIW, my poor little limping booger of a PC... Anyway, good thread; thanks to the powers-that-be...

P.S. ebay can, from time to time, present a nice option. I got a Terratec EWS88MT for $100. It's an 8x8 analogue (RCA jacks), 2xMIDI and S/PDIF breakout-box with PCI card, and latency/drivers (WDM and ASIO) are favorable. It's also still a pretty widely-used system. More I/O than you need I know, but it was a bargain, and Terratec is still making drivers available on the website. So ebay's worth peeking in at... Just thought I'd add it- but that 24/96 sounds like a great deal.

 

[charger]

I know the SB card isn't the greatest but, the cards you mentioned before that offer "zero latency monitoring" ONLY monitor the signal going INTO the card. NOT what is being recorded. To actually hear what is being recorded will ALWAYS have some latency. A good DAW will be down to 3 or 4 ms. It seems, from reading on here, that an acceptable latency is anything under 10ms.

You are incorrect. Sorry. The latency is a "heard" thing. You can direct monitor through a mixer, and mute your record input from the DAW, and everything you record will line up. At least, that's how it works in my DAW... Pro Tools LE... no matter what I set the latency to (same thing, IIRC, when I tried Reaper). If it doesn't work that way in your system, it's not working right... but don't blame the messenger. Zero latency monitoring works.

 

[solo2racr]

Maybe I didn't explain what I was trying to say very well. I wish I could remember the thread on here that explained it. The best analogy I can think of is like an old 8 track reel to reel tape recorder. You know how the play head is directly after the rec. head? There will always be a slight delay(latency) between what you have recorded and playing that back. That delay, for tape, is the distance between the two heads and the tape speed. For digital, it would be how much electronics it has to pass though to get back out before it can be heard. Monitoring what you HAVE (past tenses) recorded as soon as it is written to disc will take some time to get back out. To the best of my knowledge digital is fast but, not instantaneous (IE: zero latency).

What I got from the other thread on here is there will be some amount of time between what is going into the DAW, write it to disc, and get it back out.

What I was trying to get at is the difference between monitoring the input signal and monitoring what you have wrote to disc.

If I have read the other thread wrong, let me know.

 

[charger]

That is not what happens in a "zero latency" configuration. Or in the scenario I described (monitoring through a mixer). In a zero latency software configuration, the sound you put in is sent right back out to you, and mixed with the audio already coming off your disk. *You do not hear what your software has recorded while you are recording.* That is why a "ZERO-LATENCY MONITORING" configuration works. You don't have to hear 5 or 7 or 23 ms of delay. You don't hear any delay. Behind the scenes, the software takes what you are hearing, digitizes it, and sticks it on disk, while sticking it in the right place on the timeline with your other audio files. But the only thing you hear while recording is the audio that already exists, mixed with the audio that is coming in and is routed back out through a hardware mixer (not off the disk). Even in a slow "zero latency" hardware monitoring setup, the lag would be nearly undetectable.

However, if you do not have that option, you are stuck with your system's latency. Most dedicated audio hardware will provide it, though.

 

[solo2racr]

I understand how "zero latency" works. You are monitoring the input signal (the track your recording) mixed with the other tracks that are already there. What I was referring to is that to monitor the track you are recording once it has been written to disc you will have some latency. For example, let's say you are recording a track with a lot of vst effects on it.( not sure why you would, I prefer to record dry and get it wet after) You wouldn't know untill after the track was recorded, when you play it back, if there are pops and such i the track ( to many effects for the system). That would be the problem with a zero latency setup. Monitoring the track after it is written to disc will reveal any flaws in the track.

This is really the reason for the original question, how to reduce latency (CPU or RAM). There are some cases where I would prefer to have SOME effects used on the recorded track.

The other side to that is to use outboard effects on the recorded signal and use the zero latency setup and not use vst's

I guess that I'm not describing correctly what I want to say. Either that or what I AM trying to say is so wack that it just off everyones radar.

 

[sloom]

So Charger, your over-dub audio goes in through the converters and there, at a software mixer (software 'Control Panel', or in your case Pro Tools LE) the signal is 'split'- as in a hardware routing scheme- and is sent to the disk to be written and back out (i.e., before the writing to disk stage) simultaneously.

Right, I just reiterated your post.

Yeah, it seems to me you can do this in Reaper- probably Samplitude SE also, which I just started using. I'll have to check that out!

 

[charger]

I understand how "zero latency" works. You are monitoring the input signal (the track your recording) mixed with the other tracks that are already there. What I was referring to is that to monitor the track you are recording once it has been written to disc you will have some latency. For example, let's say you are recording a track with a lot of vst effects on it.( not sure why you would, I prefer to record dry and get it wet after) You wouldn't know untill after the track was recorded, when you play it back, if there are pops and such i the track ( to many effects for the system). That would be the problem with a zero latency setup. Monitoring the track after it is written to disc will reveal any flaws in the track.

This is really the reason for the original question, how to reduce latency (CPU or RAM). There are some cases where I would prefer to have SOME effects used on the recorded track.

The other side to that is to use outboard effects on the recorded signal and use the zero latency setup and not use vst's

I guess that I'm not describing correctly what I want to say. Either that or what I AM trying to say is so wack that it just off everyones radar.

I'll just say that, having Pro Tools hardware, onboard sound, and a Soundblaster... even on a ripping fast machine... the Soundblaster and the onboard sound card ALWAYS have performance issues, even on the same app. It's one of those scenarios where the best thing you can do to upgrade your system is not RAM or CPU, but audio hardware.

I don't think that any of the DAWs actually record the output of the plugins to disk... I think it's always recorded dry, even if you put plugins on the track while you are recording. I think that's standard across everything I use... PT, FLStudio, and Reaper.

 

[danny.guitar]

Reaper has the option to record the output, meaning, after whatever effects you have on there. (Right-click the volume meter of the track).

I'm not sure why you would do that though.

 

[SuperGeek]

ESI JULI@ card

Here's another card I came across. The esi Juli@. Anyone have info/feedback on it?

http://www.esi-audio.com/products/julia/

I have had my Juli@ card for over a year works great.
My new audio interface is a RME-Audio Fareface 800.
I am also playing around with a MOTO 896 as well but the FF-800 is much better IMO

I started to use the ESI Juli@ card in a older machine it works just as great as ever its good that it has 2 options RCA at -10 or 1/4 inch balanced

My 2 Watts