Davids recording, mixing and mastering learning experience...with your help!

Thanks, well i'll see how it goes.. I just thought posting threads about the most simple things would get quite annoying! I'll post info on what i'm using when I get started, but its a basic interface affair using things like Amplitube and Superior Drummer with the only real live recorded item being the vocals which will be via SM58. :)

How are you getting the signal into your PC?

Tascam US-144 usb interface. I started having an odd problem the past days... when playing or recording it jerks along unless the latency is set to the highest in the Tascam control panel.. Is this a normal thing? It seems it was fine on any setting before now though! David

That can sometimes happen if you are running more tracks than usual, or running more stuff in the background. If everything else is the same, you may have to contact Tascam to get resolution on that.

I did a little test... 5 midi tracks with Superior drummer no problem. But 5 Audio and an issue. I suppose audio is much more intensive anyhow so probably not that odd but still doesn't seem like much.. David

Maybe some effects you're running are using all of your computers resources... Press ctrl-alt-p and see what's using your computers resources while your project is glitchy.

Wow, useful feature I didn't know of! Now maybe this is all normal. I'm running 9 tracks all with Amplitube on, but they're all the same audio file for testing purposes. The CPU Usage reaches 200%!! but with the latency on the Tascam control panel at highest the CPU usage goes down a lot and only reaches 73% on average. So my understanding of latency must be wrong because I didn't think it had anything to do with CPU usage.. Is this normal then? Thanks for your help David

you're right in that a faster cpu doesn't necessarily equate to lower latency. But setting lower latency will certainly tax the cpu more.

Good point Eric. That probably was my issue. I was actually using the foldback built into the MBox for monitoring, and that is actually what I do now with my Firepod, I just use the "Direct out" monitoring. It works for everything except an external Pre I have running innto it on the spdif input, that has to go through Reaper and come back. I just make sure that I put mics that don't need to be monitored on those channels, or run an extra mic into the firepod as a monitoring mic.

Lower latency doesn't increase CPU usage very much. But for the audio to play without glitching the buffers have to be filled with the correct data by the time the previous buffers are finished playing. The shorter the buffers are the greater the chance that processing won't be finished in time occasionally (or frequently, if it's really bad) and the DAW will have no choice but to either stop playback, or more likely just send the unfinished buffer into the playback stream.