Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

[sstanfield]

Last night my neighbor and I finally got around to trying out Audacity. We mic'ed everything through the PA, one track at a time into an HP laptop, listening to the playback through headphones, and playing along. He played a drum track first, then a bass track, then I did a guitar track, then he sang.

The problem we had was that each time we recorded a new track, there was a fraction of a second time lag of the new track. We were able to fix it by deleting a tiny piece of the new track at the beginning, but it was hit and miss and a PITA. The sound quality was surprisingly good!

Is this normal for Audacity, or a problem with the computer, or something else?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

 

[Virtual Kevorkian]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

That's what's known as latency - quite common when running a soundcard instead of an audio interface, as well as not enough RAM.

 

[El Dunco]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

There is a Time Movement tool to fix that lag instead of you having to delete anything

 

[cream123]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

There is a Time Movement tool to fix that lag instead of you having to delete anything

+1

 

[sstanfield]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

There is a Time Movement tool to fix that lag instead of you having to delete anything

Thanks for the tip. I found it. I don't know why I didn't see it last night - too late I guess.

 

[astrozombie]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

dude, i have never had that lag problem...

 

[Reload in 5]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

I dont have a lag problem and I use a sound card as input. It is obviously a common issue if they have a tool built in to fix it though.
Also, I run it on a 1gig p3 with 256 RAM, so it doesnt take a lot of hardware to run it.

 

[skyydogg01]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

hey, once I get myself a mixer, I'll be running it with a celeron 400 MHz and 192 MB of ram. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

 

[sstanfield]

Re: Audacity - Anyone use it? I have questions

I thought the lag was probably because of laptop hardware. The onboard sound probably isn't as fast as a PCI soundcard.
It has an Intel Centrino T2300 1.66 ghz processor with 512 mb of RAM before it shares it with the video, etc. I have almost enough parts laying around to build a desktop computer I could keep in the music room. I'll probably do that soon. Recording last night was kinda' fun - I think I'm hooked!