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Known Participant
January 31, 2017
Answered

Audition CS5.5 Hear Computer Sounds While Recording With ASIO?

  • January 31, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1022 views

Hi!

So I have been using WDM with a PCIE sound card Asus Xonar Essence STX to record while playing games, however I keep getting dropped samples resulting in places distorted audio and ultimately audio that constantly goes out of sync. So I would like to use ASIO instead of WDM so that this doesn't happen anymore but I can't hear anything from my computer in regards to the game sounds while recording and Audition has control of the driver. Is it at all possible to not have it essentially mute my entire computer while recording?

Otherwise I will have to stick with WDM and hope the audio isn't too screwed up. With WDM I have the microphone set as the master clock and everything across my system is set to 24bit 48KHz where possible.

I have Soundbooth as well, does that suffer from the same issues?


Cheers!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer SteveG_AudioMasters_

    GSFXStudios wrote:

    So I would like to use ASIO instead of WDM so that this doesn't happen anymore but I can't hear anything from my computer in regards to the game sounds while recording and Audition has control of the driver. Is it at all possible to not have it essentially mute my entire computer while recording?

    Bad news I'm afraid - the answer is - inherently - a resounding NO. The purpose of ASIO is essentially to bypass as much of the Windows OS as possible - and it's pretty good at that. So your sound device would have to be incredibly smart, and allow a streaming input from a non-ASIO source into an ASIO app. It's just possible that you might be able to achieve this with ASIO4ALL, but it would mean that it would have to see a direct input in it from your game source, and that seems somewhat unlikely. What is more likely to work when you'd finally figured out how to do it (and it can be a right sod to set up) is Virtual Audio Cable - and don't necessarily bother with ASIO. The chances are that if you can capture the stream with this and have it available directly as an input without being messed about by Windows Audio (which is almost certainly what's causing your dropped samples and any other difficulties you might be having...) you'll end up with a much cleaner result.

    I know it's a pain, but almost certainly the best results are to be obtained by using two different machines to do this - one for the game, and another to record the results. The situation has nothing inherently to do with Audition - that just records what it's sent. But some games can take over parts of the machine that Audition (or any other software, come to that) want available, and that's more likely to be the cause of dropped samples than anything else in this particular scenario - some games can be very resource-heavy.

    2 replies

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    January 31, 2017

    GSFXStudios wrote:

    So I would like to use ASIO instead of WDM so that this doesn't happen anymore but I can't hear anything from my computer in regards to the game sounds while recording and Audition has control of the driver. Is it at all possible to not have it essentially mute my entire computer while recording?

    Bad news I'm afraid - the answer is - inherently - a resounding NO. The purpose of ASIO is essentially to bypass as much of the Windows OS as possible - and it's pretty good at that. So your sound device would have to be incredibly smart, and allow a streaming input from a non-ASIO source into an ASIO app. It's just possible that you might be able to achieve this with ASIO4ALL, but it would mean that it would have to see a direct input in it from your game source, and that seems somewhat unlikely. What is more likely to work when you'd finally figured out how to do it (and it can be a right sod to set up) is Virtual Audio Cable - and don't necessarily bother with ASIO. The chances are that if you can capture the stream with this and have it available directly as an input without being messed about by Windows Audio (which is almost certainly what's causing your dropped samples and any other difficulties you might be having...) you'll end up with a much cleaner result.

    I know it's a pain, but almost certainly the best results are to be obtained by using two different machines to do this - one for the game, and another to record the results. The situation has nothing inherently to do with Audition - that just records what it's sent. But some games can take over parts of the machine that Audition (or any other software, come to that) want available, and that's more likely to be the cause of dropped samples than anything else in this particular scenario - some games can be very resource-heavy.

    JoeStkAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 31, 2017

    I get what you are saying. I do have virtual audio cable for use in multitrack sessions. For some reason my sound card views the microphone as stereo, any program that tries to make that mono ends up mixing the left and right channel into the same track cancelling itself out, because really the 2 channels are meant for flipped polarity to cancel out noise during transit across the cable. So Audition takes one channel into a mono track then outputs it to virtual audio cable which is set as the microphone for communications applications. Not sure how I would set it up to get the result I am looking for.


    I saw DirectSound in SoundBooth, would this pass all the Windows rubbish and sort out my sample dropping?

    db708990a1.png

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    January 31, 2017

    Directsound only works on OS's up to XP. It's a part of the old DirectX library, which I think powered Noah's Ark, and I'm pretty sure that there's absolutely zero support for this now - so no available driver for your sound device. In a way, it's a shame, as it could concatenate multiple sources. IIRC it was pretty much dead in the water about 6-7 years ago.

    As for the rest of it, I suspect that you'll need more than one instance of VAC, although you'll need a means of concatenating them - and it's just possible that you could persuade ASIO4ALL to do that - at a pinch. But, you'll have to experiment to find out whether it would actually work...

    ryclark
    Participating Frequently
    January 31, 2017

    Monitoring is down to what's available in the sound cards supplied settings software. It should have a record monitoring function in it somewhere. It is not down to Audition. So it would be exactly the same in Soundbooth. But it may be a limitation of Asus's ASIO driver. Have you the latest? Also you don't say what version of Windows you are running.

    You might find that increasing the audio buffer size might get shot of the dropped samples problem. but how you adjust that again depends on the Xonar's software.

    JoeStkAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 31, 2017

    So there should be some setting in the sound card software which my speakers are plugged into, to continue playing back all sound on my computer (videos, songs etc.) through my speakers while recording using ASIO rather than nothing but my voice that is being recorded?