[digiology]

Hi, I bought a Griffin iMic the other day, and decided to get stuck in to a bit of music making. I donwloaded 'ProTools Free' and startd messing around with it. I've noticed though that even in small simple audio recorders(like sound studio, final vynl etc) there is some latency, sometimes more sometimes less. It wasnt a problem though because I didnt need to hear it in realtime anyway. But in ProTools Free when recording a track you have to (or at least i have to) listen to the other track so you know when to come in with that instrument. This is a problem because I have fairly high latency in this app.
When I record a track while another is playing I listen to when to come in, and the computer records the sound from the instrument a few milliseconds later, so the two tracks aren't in sync. I presume both tracks are in the same tempo, so I could move the delayed track back a few milliseconds if I knew the exact amount of latency.


Is there any way of reducing latency?(without buying anything expensive) Is there any way of measuring the delay?


Please help!

[buddhabelly]

more info about your system, ram, hdd, processor, etc.
any plugins?

there's almost always latency, how much really depends on your hardware.

[digiology]

I have a dual 1Ghz G4 Powermac, using a griffen iMic. On OS9 when using Protools free and OSX other times. I have an 80GB hd (50GB free), 512MB ram, I didn't think this problem was to do with my specs. Im not using any plugins and I have no other programs running.

[buddhabelly]

it's not just processor and ram. i have a dedicated pci m-audio 24/96 soundcard and still get latency. latency is certainly less when using os x core audio.

my suspicion is the imic, although i've not used one. i'm pretty new to the game to and i don't really have a suggestion for you. sorry.

i'm not very familiar with protools, but sure in the audio hardware settings, there are some places to tweak latency, adjusting disk buffers etc. logic 4 has a place under it's audio hardware prefs that actually shoed me how much latency (ms) that i was getting. adusting disk buffers and a few other settings got mine down to 20 to 30 ms.

the only way for me to get zero latency on my card is to do direct hardware monitoring thru my breakout box.

another thing i noticed was your hdd. if your recording and running the software on the same drive, that will kill performance pretty quickly too. once i moved my audio work onto a second drive, track count and performance increased. running on a second drive helps reduce fragmentation as well as not overworking your system drive by having to jump all over the place.

hope i helped a little.

[digiology]

Yeah if I could find out the exact latency that would help, because I'd be able to mave audio tracks back or forward in time so the they are in sync when playing together.
Another problem I've been getting is when I hook up my elctric guitar, even though there is not clipping at the volume I have it set at there is distortion sometimes, and alot of the time the sound is fuzzy, quiet and cuts out slightly every so often(all cables in properly too). Is it something to do with how much sound is going in? Its coming out the headphone jack in the amplifier for my guitar so I though it would be like any other sound source. It seems to work sometimes and sometimes not.

[digiology]

Oh yeah, does anyone know how to measure the latency, and I cant quite find out how to move tracks forware and back in time giving an exact figure in milliseconds(its drag and drop).

[buddhabelly]

an output from your headphone jack on any device is amplified. and i think that the imic amplifies the signal too. it probably is a combination of the imic (although i heard that it was much less noisy compared to the built in sound-in) and the level of the amp. one way to get the levels down to line is to use a mixer.

i've never gotten even 'demo' quality guitar sound by running it from the headphone jack. i've had better results by miking the amp; even with a cheap mic it is better or i did have the luxury of using a preprocessor/amp emulator like the line6 pod for awhile. that was nice. guitar signals are generally noisy, especially once you through in an amplifier. pre/post processors are almost a must. for me anyway.

now i find myself sampling live acoustic guitar with my minidisc recorder (great for playing in different weird places) and working w/ that.

of course i'm not trying to write really guitar based songs anymore. i love 'traditional' blues, rock, folk, etc guitar based music, but am becoming more interested in the experimentation of electronic based music.

[digiology]

I've come across a few people already saying to get a mixer, but I dont have a clue what it is, if it reduces the constant hiss I'd consider buying one. I read somewhere else that you can use them for getting rid of latency with mixers, but I find thats doubtful unless it just duplicates the sound before going into your mac. How much is it for a cheap mixer?