Overdubbing Latency?

mesastudio

Hi all -

I'm trying to get a friend set up on an XP based DAW, it's just a hobby thing for him and when I told him what to get we decided that a Soundblaster should be sufficient for his needs. Got the system set-up and running (under Sonar 1.3 - I've gone to Sonar 3 and just gave him my old app).
Noted the problem that Cakewalk has with Creative's stock drivers and downloaded the KX ones.

Everything should be fine, but there is a definate problem with overdubbing - the new track will always be somewhat delayed against the first. At first I assumed it was based on Sonar's latency slider, but some testing has shown that not to be the case - recording several takes in succession against a click on track one, with the Sonar latency slider set at widely different values, the new tracks are consistant in their offset, ie they line up perfectly with each other but are all offset from the reference click by a uniform amount. Sonar latency settings make no difference...

I've never encountered this with my own rig - I'm more "semi-pro/pro" and have always used upper end interfaces (Layla, now 828mkII) which tout "zero-latency monitoring". Is this the issue, does the SB not have that capability? This has to be a common enough problem, what's the deal, and workaround? And yes, I've checked over all the KX info stuff.

Any insights? I've gotta be missing something, and I've got a friend on hold after spending money on my advice, I feel kinda crummy right now and would like to resolve this for him. Any help would be appreciated....

Thanks

Ric

ADDED LATER - I KNEW I was missing something! I read thru every durn thing on the KX site in AGONIZING detail, and noted their recommendation to avoid using the 0/1 wave out - that out is apparently default-patched to the DSP, which introduces delay. Had my friend switch to the 4/5 outs and run the same tests as before - BINGO! He's happy, I'm happy. (They really should have that little tidbit in boldface at the top of the page....) Thanks to the gent who responded below, appreciate your taking a moment. Now - let's get down to making some music.........

miguel

It's normal that some extra latency (other that input/output buffers) is induced somewhere. You just need to tell sonar how much is it.

What you need to do it to playback some audio in sonar and record it at the same time, you better disable software monitorig (or live input monitoring or whatever the name is in sonar) to prevent feedback loop before you do this.

Load a tight snare drum in one track and set another track to record. Now create the audio loop. It can be just connecting the fxbus to the asio input or you can use a cable and create an analog or digital loop. I had slightly different numbers (+1ms) using the dsp or passing the signal through an analog cable. Just zoom into the audio view and measure the delay between the original and the recorded.

Ableton live's timeline is in miliseconds so it's straight to measure. If sonar shows samples just do the math 48000 samples >> one second

In my case I have 5ms (input) + 5ms (output) + 2 ms (set by hand in preferences) = 12ms

Now repeat and check if the shift got smaller. If you change asio buffers you should have to redo this