latency prob w/laptop...

[goldenmean]

ive been recording on a pc laptop using cool edit pro. the laptop is pretty new, pretty fast, has a celeron and def enough ram to handle cool edit.

i record through a presonus mobile pre usb stereo preamp.

whenever i multi track and start to do overdubbed parts (mono), the overdubs, even when played tight to the drums, seem to waver slightly.. theyre not exactly as tight with the other tracks. they just seem off a little, but theyre still close enough that moving the track a little fucks the whole thing up.

i have my latency set to medium right now. ive tried adjusting this but the same thing seems to occur. is there perhaps another setting i am overlooking that is causing this? ive heard of 'optimizing' yr pc for audio but dont know what to do...

[drliebs]

The way I understand latency is that if it is high it makes playback of virtual instruments and MIDI and realtime monitoring difficult. Once the track has been recorded it is adjusted so that it plays back in time. You can have high latency and playback will be fine, allthough you might notice a delay between hitting play and hearing audio.

This sounds more like a synch problem where the sound card is losing synch with the audio application (or with other hardware). Are you using a built in sound card?

I had a similar thing happen when I had an Echo Audio Gina card with two inputs, recording simultaneously with a Soundblaster Live. The two cards had no way of keeping synch with each other and were off by a few samples. Individually the recorded tracks sounded fine, but played together they slowly but surely lost synch until they were off by half a second or more.

If your card supports direct monitoring, then you can increase your buffers in cool edit pro, giving you higher latency but smoother playback. Since monitoring is done by the hardware, everything plays back in time even with a higher latency. For realtime MIDI and VST instruments you need latency to be very low or there will be a delay from hitting a key and hearing a note.

Hope this helps