Midi and vocal recording

[Patrick Viviers]

Hey Guys,

Perhaps you can help please. I'm running a Sound Blaster ZXR card and 16gigs of RAM. I get latency problems sometimes. Should I record the vocals before I bounce the midi down to audio. or bounce down and then record vocals?? Please help if you can.

 

[Alan Tubbs]

If you don’t get rid of the sound blaster I’d suggest bouncing all midi to audio, disable and archive those synth tracks so your computer can catch its breath and then record acoustic stuff.  I habitually do this even if I’m not pushing my computer so at mixdown I’m dealing with all audio.  If you need to change a track, unarchive it and edit away.  Once finished, bounce and archive it again.

@

[Byron Dickens]

Ditch the sound blaster and get a real audio interface.

[reginaldStjohn]

In addition, Check which driver mode you are using. Try WASPI exclusive or shared to see if you have any better luck

[bitflipper]

A lot of folks will tell you to dump the SoundBlaster. In an ideal world, we're all working with RME, Lynx or Antelope interfaces. But in the real world, we have to make do with what we've got. And in truth you really can record decent vocals with a SoundBlaster as long as you're careful not to drive its microphone preamp  into distortion.

But I'll second the other advice to freeze/render your VIs first. That'll take a load off your CPU and allow you to use smaller buffers and thus reduce latency. Latency need not be an issue anyway. I record vocals with my buffers set to 2048. That's enormous latency. Doesn't impact my vocals or their alignment in the mix, though. The only catch is that I cannot echo the mic channel's input, e.g. to make use of a reverb plugin. But that's not a good idea anyway.