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Latency while recording

twinjet

twinjet

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Sep 23, 2008
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#1
Hi all. I am by no means an expert in recording. I have only a USB interface by Roland (UA-1G). While it sounds fine, recording other tracks behind my primary results in a bit of a lag. I've heard XLR cables are an excellent upgrade. If I buy an XLR-USB cable to direct sound out of my stack into my laptop, would that solve the problem?

Also, anyone with a UA1G... Is this thing worth keeping, or is it trash?
 
#2
Doesn't your soundcard interface have a direct monitoring control?

That is in my experience the best way to solve the problem.

Meaning that what you play will be put out directly through the sound card, while the play back tracks will go through your computer and DAW.

You could try setting the latency in your DAW to a lower value too.

If that doesn't solve your problem and your soundcard interface doesn't come with a direct monitoring control, I am afraid your only solution is to upgrade to something that has a direct monitoring control or get a Firewire interface.
 
#3
You should be able to adjust the recording offset in your DAW to account for tracking latency.

Essentially, route a simple recorded track from your DAW to a hardware output and back into a new track in your DAW. Compare the timing of the two tracks to measure the timing delay, and adjust with your DAW's recording offset (usually under i/o settings).
 
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#6
Roland is generally good stuff. Are you using it with Cakewalk Music Creator? (The unit appears to be affiliated with Cakewalk, which I've been using for 10 years)
At any rate, you may need to set the device mode, within the recording software, to ASIO. There should be a slider bar for latency, personally I'd just set as low as possible.

I had a latency problem creep up a few weeks ago - do you leave your PC in standby mode?
I had left my machine in "sleep" ( I hear its easier on the power supply ) , and the next day, prepped for recording. I cleaned up and defragged the hard drives, laid down a guitar track, picked up the bass, and...massive latency. I futzed with it for hours before trying a reboot. Problem solved. I've no idea why, perhaps a "memory leak".

I hope this helps. Unless its really broken, which is unlikely, that Roland should allow you to multitrack quite smoothly.
 
#7
I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but I know I had nightmares with latency when I was new at digital recording. The fix for me (which is still a fix at times when I'm fiddling with new programs) was in checking the ASIO driver, that in Cubase is under Device Setup (don't know what program you're using). If you can find that, check that it's the Roland driver and not one of the other computer drivers, or the direct X driver. If that doesn't help, there's a free driver called ASIOforall that I used to always download on my old computers. It also fixed things.

Messing with the latency controls never had any effect on my latency problems. They just took up a lot of my time and frustrated me.
 

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