Any recommendations on recording with Live & extern mixer?

[MarcAaron]

I'm running Live on a nicely configured Windows XP Pro system and have never had any latency problems when recording/playing using external MIDI keyboards and controllers. The Ableton tutorials on setting up buffers & such are spot-on and have always worked for me.

But now I've started taking voice lessons and want to record my voice along with a simple, single karaoke mp3 playing on another track. So I hook up a nice USB mic and... horrible delay! Vocals come across way out of sync with the music and I have to turn off the output of my vocal track when recording, so I cannot get a headphone mix to sing with. No amount of tweaking will resolve this. I've tried 2 different audio cards. Even tried a similar setup on my iMac but the delay is still there.

I came across a deal on a used Peavey Unity 12-channel stereo mixing board (that was only driven to church once a week on Sunday by an old lady, etc.) and mated it with a nice mic; routed the audio from my PC into the board, routed the audio of the mic back into the line-in on my PC to record and... horrible delay! Yes, I have a headphone mix that sounds good, but I still have to go back in and manually line up the recorded vocals because they're so out of sync in Live.

I've got my finger on the "buy it" button of a digital recorder on Amazon.com with thoughts of removing Live completely from the recording equation, but it seems like there should be a way to accomplish this using the gear I already have. Or is Live just not suited to recording live vocals?

Apologies for such a long post but I wanted to fully describe what's happening in hopes somebody can steer me in the right direction.

[monobeach]

have yout tried to lower the sample buffer size of your audio card (to something like 128 or 256 samples)? what driver are you using? Have you tried asio4all?

you'd definitely benefit from a deidcated sound card like any of those:

http://www.thomann.de/gb/audio_interfaces.html

[MarcAaron]

Thanks for the reply monobeach. Yes, I have played with the buffer settings for literally hours. In the process I discovered and eliminated a problem unrelated to the buffer settings (which I'll talk about next). I can maintain an uninterrupted flow of sound now for a certain period of time -- which is never consistent -- but eventually I start getting dropouts which get worse and worse until there's nothing but a distorted mess. This happens with 2 different sound cards with Live buffering reconfigured each time I swap cards.

The non-buffer problem I mentioned that I solved was an option labelled "do not monitor through this device" in one of the sound card setups and "do not map through this device" in the other -- I'm assuming these mean the same thing to the respective sound card because for each, CHECKING the box eliminates something I did not realize was happening & interpreted as delay/latency: the sound going through the card plays back TWICE if the box is not checked. I hear the original sound, then an echo of that sound slightly thereafter. The way it blended together sounded exactly like a delay.

Anyway I will take your advice and investigate the better quality sound cards. It may just be that the consumer-level cards I have in my PCs and Macs cannot perform at the level required for a top-end DAW apps like Live. It is a bit of a rude surprise though because up to this point, I have created some extremely "busy" sets in Live with tons of CPU-hungry devices driven by an external MIDI controller and both Live and my sound card/computer system have handled the load with no latency or dropout problems

[monobeach]

right, recording audio with monitor off will leave you with the direct signal without the delay caused by the signal travelling through soundcard-computer-and back - it's the preferable way to record audio

maybe using the asio4all-driver can solve some stability issues: http://www.asio4all.com/

[MarcAaron]

SO CLOSE!!! Thank you for the ASIO recommendation. I can now record without dropouts but am having trouble confirming latency is gone because there's no longer any output from my sound card when I select the Driver Type == ASIO in the Live config. So any audio coming out of Live -- like my karaoke track -- cannot be heard in order to sing along with.

I will keep playing with the ASIO setup as it appears you are onto something. I think I will also follow your initial recommendation and get a pro quality sound card regardless. As I understand it, the better cards usually come with their own native ASIO drivers? I'm convinced now that I can accomplish my goals using my current H/W sans the consumer sound card, & Live 8 seems fully capable of recording mic and line input in real time. I'm attracted to the option of having a sound card with more input lines anyway

Many thanks for your advice!

[monobeach]

Hi,

glad that you have success in recording.
Regarding the asio driver for output: that should definitely work (works for me!). After selecting the asio driver in ableton, do you see an input as well as an output latency below? If there's no putput latency indicated, the output routing is somehow disabled. Check in 'start'-'system'-'sounds and audio devices', if the asio driver is selected in audio devices. Also in Live, check in channel configuration, if the output channels 1&2 are activated.
sometimes, restarting Live helps also - make sure, no other audio application is active at this point.

You'd benefit in several ways from a dedicated soundcard: you are right, they come with their own asio drivers, optimized for performance. Secondly, both the quality of the recorded audio as well as the audio output should be significantly better compared to the build in card due to better AD analog/digital) and DA conversion.

good luck!

[MarcAaron]

I just double-checked and yes, I do see both and input and output latency values, 13.0ms each for a combined value of 26.0ms

And good advice you gave on restarting Live after fiddling with the settings. Usually it would behave when I changed Driver Type between MMX and ASIO, but other times I didn't hear any results until I restarted.

One thing I didn't have quite right was under the H/W tab in ASIO4All, and after I changed it I am getting decent results now: apparently my sound card wasn't enabled as far as the ASIO controls went. There's a little blue-ish green LED-type icon next to the cards, and for some reason the lights were dark. Clicking them seemed to enable everything.

Until I get a better sound card, I have found a workaround solution for vocal recording with almost zero latency: my trusty MacBook Pro! It makes my custom-built music PC look horrible in comparison. For some reason I had it in my head that I'd already tried the Mac and claimed it didn't work. A big slice of Humble Pie for my error

One last thing and I'll hush: could anyone running Live 8 on Windows XP Pro give me a solid thumbs-up on a card that plays well in a PCI slot? And would any type of external card be an option for me, possibly adding a Firewire card to the system first?

[monobeach]

if you'd purchase an external Firewire or USB interface like the MOTU Ultralight (which is highly estimated on these sites; see also Presonus, Alesis, Focusrite, RME) you'd have:

- several in- and outputs
- an interface you can use on with your PC as well as with the macbook
- portability

[MarcAaron]

if you'd purchase an external Firewire or USB interface like the MOTU Ultralight

Thanks for the tip. I think a Firewire solution might be in my future if my current workaround should fail with more complex Live sets. I'm getting near-zero latency on my Macbook when recording live vocals as bounced-down audio plays on a second track. Even adding a smear of high-quality, CPU-hungry reverb for the vocal/headphone mix doesn't cause any performance problems, so I'm OK for now.

The only reason I haven't moved completely from my XP Pro-based DAW to a Mac is because of my 2 favorite soft synths. Z3ta isn't supported on the Mac, and there are some annoying differences in the Mac version of Rapture vs the Windows version.