Birthday Party for Aural Moon......official invitation.

[jtmckinley]

Many thanks to JamForte and KeithieW for holding down the fort and shepherding us through a wonderful day (and night) on the Moon, great job guys!

To Keithie:

BTW Keithie it's jtmckinley as in James T. McKinley, not jtmccinley or jtmcinley. K! K as in Keithie!, you misspelled it twice in this thread LOL. K?

To Iain:

Thanks for laying out how you guys did the show, good info for muso geeks like me

You experienced the bane of digital recording with the 100+ ms delay on your voice, that's always a problem with a DAW (and apparently with Nicecast as well) to varying degrees, but there are solutions. Not sure what gear you have in your studio (I saw what looked to be a Roland drum kit, I have the TD-20 BK myself, dunno about your audio interfaces), but the best way is a sound card or other AD/DA device that lets you monitor direct off the card, the EMU 1212 is a relatively inexpensive example:

http://www.emu.com/products/product.asp?product=9872

To wit: "PatchMix™ DSP zero-latency hardware mixing and monitoring - with super-flexible patchbay - no external mixer needed" is the relevant bit

I usually don't bother to do it with SONAR since my latency is usually < 50 ms, but I have singer and drummer friends that can't even deal with that, so I've used the direct monitor on my Focusrite preamp in the past. The nice thing about the EMU card (just got one for upstairs) is that it has on-board FX too so you can give a singer a little "love" with reverb and delay on their mix even when it's a direct monitor (plus it's a pretty cheap card with good converters, same as in the Pro Tools 192, I've seen it for $79 online). Also the patch bay software on the 1212 is pretty cool, I can record anything that produces sound on my computer upstairs.

Thanks again!

jt

[JamForte(Admin)]

Thanks for the comments
(and sorry about the typos, it's as likely they're mine as Keithie's -- I edited some of the thread -- rest assured, we both have your name correct when speaking).

Originally Posted by jtmckinley

You experienced the bane of digital recording with the 100+ ms delay on your voice, that's always a problem with a DAW (and apparently with Nicecast as well) to varying degrees, but there are solutions.

What you noted above is different between a "self-engineered live performance" and a recording session.

When recording, I can give every member of a band a different "zero-latency" headphone mix - (mostly MOTU outboard gear here). That is fine, even if I'm one of the players - because the final processed mix is done from a multi-tracked recording (so who cares what delays are introduced by FX and so on).

In this case we were live - and needed to listen to the final mix ( no luxury of a separate mixing engineer ) - and even though I'd set the DAW (and system) audio buffers to circa 6ms - some plugin, effect or aspect of Nicecast was upsetting that by adding its own latency.

I could have added a "zero-delay" feed to bypass this but, obviously, all that does is to give a false impression of the balance (and one of echo) on the final mix.

The effect was noted "for the record" (and because people expressed an interested in what we were using to do the show). It was a minor (and geeky) irritation that didn't stop the fun of the day at all..

cheers,
Jam