[Emmett Andrews]

Monitor speakers. Period.

You can’t effectively place things in the stereo field or use EQ properly when using headphones.

I have four sets of headphones that I use to reference, my go-to pair being a $240 set of Beyers. None can even come close to mixing on monitors, though they are good for details.

Emmett

[Emmett Andrews]

This could easily take an entire book to explain…So I’ll just tell you to look into gating and expansion for drums. That’s your best bet. Everything else should be done BEFORE any mixing…That is, careful micing and recording. It should not have a “live” sound when you record it.

You’ll need something better than old, cheap headphones if you ever want your EQ and stereo mixing to even come CLOSE to what it should be, FYI. Monitor headphones are better, monitor speakers are best.

Emmett

[Emmett Andrews]

Again, the basic answer is probably “no”.

Let me compare it to something for you, as a lot of people wonder the same thing and ask similar questions…

If you bake a cake from scratch, beat the eggs, mix in all the ingredients, mix the batter, etc. Once the cake is baked, can you take out one of the eggs? It’s basically the same thing that you’re trying to accomplish.

Now, if the background noise was recorded in descrete stereo and the voice was recorded in mono and is panned center, the center channel extractor can help. You’ll find it in your effects menu. There are various presets, including “acapella”, which is the preset designed to remove the background and leave the vocal.

With serious time spent on careful EQ, you MIGHT be able to make the vocal appear a bit more upfront, but you’ll probably ruin the overall sound in the process. Still, you can tinker with the graphic or parametric EQ and see what happens!

Emmett

[Emmett Andrews]

To put it simply, no. You can try to mess with the center channel extractor. How effective it is will depend entirely on the mix. Don’t expect much.

[Emmett Andrews]

I’m confused…If it’s working with ASIO4ALL, why not just use that as the driver?

FWIW, my E-mu card’s ASIO driver works fine with Reason 3.0 rewired into Audition 3.0.

Emmett

[Emmett Andrews]

I have wondered the same thing. There must be a reason for it, but I don’t know what it would be. Maybe it takes more processing power and some people don’t need the feature. Or maybe it has to be disabled if you want to sync to an external word clock. Just a couple of wild guesses.

[Emmett Andrews]

Options > Settings > Multitrack

Make sure “Correct for Drift” and “Correct for start sync” are checked.

If that doesn’t solve the issue, you’ll probably need to upgrade to something better than a consumer card.

Emmett

[Emmett Andrews]

The channel mixer uses percentage inputs, not decibel inputs.

[Emmett Andrews]

I believe Audition would be the slave for the wordclock in the Micport, which is why it would only allow for 96k. Somewhere on the unit should be a switch…Or in the software that came with it (if any did). If the sample rates don’t lock, you will get really, really awful recordings…How low is the gain? If you record at 32-bit float, you will eliminate many of the noise floor issues because your digital floor will be at -144dB instead of -96dB. You will have to convert later, but it’s probably worth it.

[Emmett Andrews]

I believe Audition would be the slave for the wordclock in the Micport, which is why it would only allow for 96k. Somewhere on the unit should be a switch…Or in the software that came with it (if any did). If the sample rates don’t lock, you will get really, really awful recordings…How low is the gain? If you record at 32-bit float, you will eliminate many of the noise floor issues because your digital floor will be at -144dB instead of -96dB. You will have to convert later, but it’s probably worth it.