How to monitor with the effects to be used turned on whilst recording rather than adding them afterwards? [was: Help a new guy out....]

Thank you Steve and Bob! Pressing the I button on the multi track gives me the exact sound that i wanted to hear.  The latency doesn't bother me because I'm just producing voice overs. It was really that easy its always one little button away from exactly what your trying to do.... thank you guys for taking the time to share your knowledge with me I greatly appreciate it.  Ben

It's possible, but if you want to monitor the effects you are going to use whilst you are recording, there will be one or two snags, I'm afraid. If you pass the signal right through Audition, add effects, and then feed it out again, you'll experience latency - a delay between what's going in and what's coming out, caused simply by the fact that your computer has to turn your analog signal into a digital one, process all of this data, and then convert it back again. This is completely unavoidable, and to make it worse, this delay can make it very difficult to use a pair of headphones - your head gets significantly confused very easily. This is why sound devices provide a direct path for monitoring - it's the only way you can avoid that situation.

But there's more. Even if you include effects for monitoring in your record chain, the signal will always be recorded dry. This is simply because it's good practice. If you record something with effects, you have absolutely no options available if you change your mind about the processing you used. Yes, the effects will remain in the channel you monitored, but if you remove them, then your raw signal remains. It's always been like that, and it won't change.

If you want to try it, then you need to set the output of the channel you want to monitor so that it outputs direct to your sound device. Next to the record button, there's a button marked 'I' that will route the channel back to the output.