Ian George Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 I've recently started using Cakewalk and I'm loving it apart from the audio recording. I'm trying to record in the audio from some hardware synths but it always comes out distorted. The waveform looks fine but it sounds distorted with a lot of clipping and turning the gain down does not change that. It makes it quiter but the distorion and clipping is still there. They only way to avoid this is to turn the volume down on the synth so low that it is barely audible. It is then very quiet in cakewalk and if I turn the gain up there is a lot of noise. I also have Cubase and that records audio perfectly. I can't find any way to adjust the recording level in cakewalk and changing the recording level in windows doesn't help. I'm using the built in intel hd audio with the generic asio drivers, I have tried using asio4all but that doesn't work at all in cakewalk. Has anyone else had this issue? Is there any fix for this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chuckebaby Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 You really need something that will allow you to control the amount of gain that is being sent to the source. Controlling levels from your synth is almost useless. Dedicated audio interfaces have a knob that controls the signal. Onboard audio does not. Why this is working in Cubase and not Cakewalk i have no idea. Only other thing i can think of is possibly you have a bad cable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scook Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 If Remove DC Offset During Recording is enabled, turn it off and try recording again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian George Posted July 24, 2020 Author Share Posted July 24, 2020 I do have the synth going through a mixer, I haven't tried changing the output level of that yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scook Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 The DAW records the signal at its input. The gain and volume controls do not affect a signal coming from outside the DAW, they affect clips in the DAW. See the signal flow diagram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 If the waveform is not visibly clipped but sounds distorted, then we can assume that the distortion isn't from clipping. Record a sine wave, then zoom in on the waveform display and see if it looks like a sine wave. For example, see if the peaks have an inverted section. Zoomed out, it'll look fine but sound nasty. That particular symptom indicates an overdriven ADC, which has nothing to do with recording levels in the DAW. Make sure you're going into the audio interface's LINE input and not its MIC input. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian George Posted July 24, 2020 Author Share Posted July 24, 2020 Something very weird just happened. I opened up cubase to try that again as I hadn't used it to record audio for a while and it worked fine. I then went back to cakewalk, opened a blank project and tried recording and it worked fine. I opened the project I had been working on and tried recording and it was distorted again. I opened another blank project and tried recording and once again it was distorted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scook Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Try using a different driver mode, such as one of the WASAPI modes if running Win10 or WDM for older OSes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian George Posted July 24, 2020 Author Share Posted July 24, 2020 1 hour ago, scook said: Try using a different driver mode, such as one of the WASAPI modes if running Win10 or WDM for older OSes. Thanks, this worked! It works perfectly now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scook Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Great The ASIO driver for internal sound chips has never worked well Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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