Need help with Latency in Adobe Audition!

[BellewTheBear]

So I've been using Cool Edit Pro 2.0 for the past like 7-8 years and it has served me very well. However, I'm ready to make the move up to Adobe Audition.


My problem is a very common one, but difficult to deal with none-the-less. LATENCY!!! Every recording musicians worst nightmare haha. I have tried and tried and tried to figure out how to set the latency properly, mostly through trial and error, to no avail.

I'm running on Windows 7 64-bit. My soundcard is built into the motherboard but I do know that it's Realtek HD Audio.

I know people need help with this all the time and I apologize if I'm being redundant, but please spare some time to give me a hand!

 

[Bobbsy]

Really, the only significant way to fix latency will be to add an external sound card--with ASIO drivers--that will let you use "direct hardware monitoring".

Your set up has a couple of strikes against it. First, the Realtek sound interface is a WME device--and WME inherently has considerably more latency than ASIO. Second, to set up a monitor mix you are restricted to the material you are recording doing a round trip via the computer, adding to the latency. Direct hardware monitoring in an external interface provides that mix before your live material goes into the computer. Third, a move to a device with ASIO drivers will allow the latency compensation built into Audition to work properly--ASIO provides the delay information that Audition needs for this to work where WME is designed only for simple playback and doesn't have this facility.

In the meantime, a couple of things to try. First, some people have found improvement by downloading Asio4All (effectively an ASIO wrapper to control WME devices. This isn't the same as proper ASIO drivers but you will find more controls than you get using the simple WME drivers.

Second, it's a bit of a fiddle but, if you're recording is only a track or two with no real time effects, try cranking down all the latency and buffer size controls to as small as you can get away with while tracking, then crank them up while mixing and adding effects. Tracking is a relatively light burden on your computer so you can usually get away with a short latency setting and small buffers even if you need more for multitrack mixing.

However, the only really satisfactory solution will be an interface with direct hardware monitoring.