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Audio Recording Latency
I’m a musician and have been using Sony Vegas to record my songs. Recently, when I try to overdub, I finish recording the guitar track and it is way out of time to the drum track that I’m trying to overdub to. It’s some kind of latency for sure, and I do not know how to fix it. PLEASE HELP!
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1 Reply
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Here’s the first level of thing to worry about: your audio driver. Windows has been around for a long time, and there are a bunch of ways to get audio in and out of the PC.
Fire up Vegas, get the Options/Preferences panel, go to Audio Device. If you see “Microsoft Sound Mapper” anywhere, you have found the worst possible way to get sound in and out of Vegas. That’s also the default. That actually routes whatever’s coming from or going to your sound card through an extra software mixer provided by Windows. This isn’t for audio work.
Click on the selector for “Audio device type:” and see if your card shows up by name. That’s a sign there’s a better driver… pick it. Try it. If that doesn’t make things much better, you may want to check the web site for the device and see if they have ASIO drivers available. An ASIO driver can get your latency down as low as 5ms, maybe even a bit less.
There’s also a brute force approach. Play to the drum track, record it… don’t worry much about sync. Once recorded, you can pretty easily sync the tracks up by ear. No good for easy punch-ins, but it works just dandy for multiple tracks. I have a couple of multitrack recorders (one PC-based, one external), but I’ve done things this way from time to time, just because my pocket recorder could follow me out to the woods or on vacation at the lake or whatever. I have one that does multitrack low latency recording now (Zoom H4n), that makes it easier, but it’s always possible to sync back, as long as you play in sync when you record.
-Dave
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