I need some a little audio recording help.. :)

[minixdaniel]

Hello.. My name is Johnny.. Lately i have been recording audio with my friend Beau.. So far we have wrote 1 song called walk it off.. Its a great song but we have been having a little problem. I use Audacity to record. When i try to record multi-track, the second track has a delay so when i play them back together, it sounds like crap.

Here is my current setup:

My guitar, mic, drums, bass and everything goes to a 12 track mixer.

Mixer outputs to the microphone input on my computer.

can anyone help?

also is there a better recording program than audacity that i can use that is free?

thanks in advance.

 

[killthepixelnow]

So you basically are using th R/L XLR output channels from your mixer into your microphone input? Are you using the stocked mic input of your computer? That's not the best way to go and you can experiment some issues such as latency (and that's wqhats actaully ahppening to your track)

My advice to you is to get an audio interface taht comes with a standard recording software and use it for your projects. I'm not talking about 1000... you can get a decent interface for less tahn 400 bucks. Well, the other option is to change your internal soundcard. That will eb cheaper but it won't come with Cubase or ProTools.

Keep posting if you're still in troubles.

 

[Dani Pace]

If you have powered monitors you can reduce the playback volume (in Audacity) and turn up the monitors. This will help reduce latency (sometimes refered to as lag) when adding tracks in Audacity. Latency issues are a common problem with most stock soundcards, they just don't have the nessassary components to handle two jobs at once. You should also use the line in (on the soundcard) rather than the mic input. The line in should be a stereo input, the mic input is probably mono. Using the line in (on some soundcards) will bypass the soundcard preamp and free it up to send the signal out with less latency so what you hear is clocer to real time. I hope this helps, if all else fails you can align the tracks with one another. One more thing, the longer a track is, the more latency becomes an issue with Audacity so try to keep songs as short as possible.

 

[minixdaniel]

HAHA! thanks guys.. i took your advice and tried to try protools and when i was searching, i found a program called REAPER. its free and it works great! No more latency!! Thank god!! thanks peeps