Multitrack recording delay

[HawaiiHippie]

Aloha all!

I'm trying to do some basic multitrack recording. Lay down one channel, go back, add accompaniment to that channel, go back, add another track for vocals, etc. etc. Really vanilla stuff. But with each pass, I get a delay. It seems to average about .040 seconds.

I checked the Preferences; the evil Enable Smart Monitoring option is off.

This happens even with no external equipment to contend with. Sitting at my desk, using the mic from my iMac, I tap out a constant beat (more or less) on my desk. I then play that back while recording to a second channel, and tap along with the first channel. When I play back the pair, there's a definite delay between tracks 1 & 2. If I continue the experiment by playing track 2 while recording track 3, then playing track 3 while recording track 4, I can see the waveform peaks shifting more and more to the right.

Surely this isn't how it's supposed to work. What am I doing wrong?

Mahalo!

Tom G

[ryclark · Accepted solution]

What audio interface are you using for your audio recording? What you are witnessing is latency which is there with any digital audio recording device. It always takes some finite time for an audio signal to be digitised fed into a buffer by the audio driver software and thence into Audition. Similarly there is a slight delay going the other way to the audio that you hear coming out of a computer.

With professional audio interfaces this latency is kept to a minimum and doesn't normally cause any problems. However using built in audio devices the audio is very often taking a somewhat longer path through the operating system and it's audio drivers. If you go to Audition's Audio Hardware preferences set up page you should find that there is a box labelled Latency. Try reducing the number there to reduce the delays through the system of your audio.

From the FAQs A quick primer on audio drivers, devices, and latency

[HawaiiHippie]

Since I'm in the early stages of this experiment, I am running without an external interface of any kind, just using the built in hardware. Are you saying that by adding a device, I'm likely to solve this issue?

I did try running the buffer setting in Audition down to its minimum, and that reduced the lag quite a bit. Didn't eliminate it, but did reduce it.

[ryclark]

HawaiiHippie  wrote

Are you saying that by adding a device, I'm likely to solve this issue?

Certainly it would on a PC, but not sure about Macs. But it would also improve your audio quality for both playback and recording with a decent external wired microphone.