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JoeStk
Known Participant
January 31, 2017
Answered

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

  • January 31, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1023 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.

    J
    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?

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    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
    Community Expert
    January 31, 2017

    I wander how Audacity manages to get around this. I hate the huge folders it creates though and love that Audition just makes a plain audio file.

    So what would be some good precautions to take to prevent sample drops? And would setting Audition at a higher priority such as above normal or high make a difference?

    I am going to give it a go at cutting and syncing my past 2 hours, but I get the feeling I may be resyncing it in so many places without any particular waveforms or claps to go by..


    JoeStk wrote:

    So what would be some good precautions to take to prevent sample drops? And would setting Audition at a higher priority such as above normal or high make a difference?

    When Audition is in Record mode, it already tries to prioritise everything it thinks it needs, but there are a few things that can still trip it up, especially in Waveform record mode. Most of these revolve around access to the temp file location, and if by any chance this is shared with a Windows temp file location, the OS will win hands down. Since in Waveform a file is written to a temp directory and not stored in its final format until you've stopped recording and actually saved it, it's a bit vulnerable. Other things that in the past that have caused all sorts of problems are wireless device polling and anti-virus software... go figure!

    In Multi-track mode things are a lot better - the audio you are recording is written straight to disk. The only thing that could potentially screw this up that you can do anything about is the buffer file. If you are recording in Multi-track then it might be worth increasing the latency value on the sound device hardware page - this will increase the buffer size, and that generally helps in terms of reducing clicks and glitches.

    With the best will in the world, it's not that difficult to overload the capabilities of a PC, especially if you have two high-performance apps competing with each other. And when you add a potentially petulant OS which seems on occasion to like introducing strange delays that I can see no rhyme nor reason for - well who knows? There is monitoring software you can run that might give you some clues, but I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for a definitive answer from it, I'm afraid; these things are often notoriously difficult to track down.

    ryclark
    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.

    J
    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?

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