Some problems recording with a soundcard

[Kowalski3500]

Hi guys. I recently got an HT Omega Striker 7.1. I've got a Spdif Cable from a BR-1600 recording unit going into the card. It's a PCI (not PCI-E) card. What I do is record my band's music with the BR-1600 and then play it back, while recording in Audacity. I've followed all the advice on the Audacity forums, going so far as to unplug my ethernet cable, turn off most other processes, and turn the priority up on the task manager. I've still got the same system as in my signature.

My problem is, when the recorder reads, say, 4:00 Audacity will read something like 3:44 And i'll have to use the editing functions of Audacity to slow it down to the proper speed.

If I were to get a newer system would that solve the problem?

[tweakboy]

Its a software problem / glitch. Omega Strikeforce needs latest vista drivers or windoz 7 driver.

Its a driver issue on the sound cards behalf... Go to safe mode, uninstall sound drivers,, then reboot and then install sound drivers latest ones official from their site, then lets see if it happens again.. gl

[Randyman...]

Sounds like a 44.1K / 48K Sample Rate discrepancy to me. I'm not familiar with that card, but make sure you are setting Audacity to the same samplerate as your BR1600. If the BR1600 is set to 44.1 and you import as 48K, it will playback fast. If the BR1600 is set to 48K and you import as 44.1K, it will sound slow (9.1% either way).

PS - I'm an "old-school" Roland VS-2480HD guy that has moved on to PC DAWs :)

Enjoy! :cool:

[tweakboy]

Good one randyman,, bravo

[Randyman...]

Hold your applause :p We'll confirm once Kowalski3500 replies :)

PS - I meant to snap a few pics of my Jamroom and home DAW setup for your other DAW thread, but I totally spaced. I'll put some up next week...

:cool:

[Kowalski3500]

I'm running on XP so the Windows 7 drivers isn't the issue, I think...
I've taken a look in the Audacity settings and the bitrate is set to 44.1 The playback does end up fast on the Audacity side. I wouldn't imagine the BR having a LOWER bitrate than 44.1...and according to the specs on the Boss website I just checked, it is indeed 44.1. Hmm

[tweakboy]

You have the audacity to tell me you use audacity LOL>

Seriously why don't you try Sony Sound Forge ,,,, u can grab a working trial , I cant believe you have the audacity to record with audacity lol, Or try windows recorder for testing,, but ya,, maybe audacity this card has its not helping us... jk jk ... lol

[Randyman...]

Have you checked that Audacity is seeing the card as 44.1, and also that the current Audacity project is a 44.1K project? I'm not familiar with Audacity, but In know in Cubase and Nuendo you have to specify the sample rate in the Audio Driver's control panel (or have it slave to an external source as you are doing with your BR1600) and ALSO have to specify your project's desired samplerate (changeable per project). The Audio Driver Samplerate and Project Samplerate are 2 seperate settings...

This sounds exactly like a 44.1/48k discrepancy to me. Keep poking around - you are bound to find the issue.

:cool:

[Kowalski3500]

Yeah, I'm using Audacity because I don't really need any function other than getting the tracks onto cds or mp3 format. The BR's CD burner just doesn't work anymore (and it's probably not under warranty, it's my brother's anyway). I've gone through Audacity's settings, it is indeed set to 44.1 and the project sample rate for ones I've done before are at 44.1 as well (as is the default when you create new projects). I don't see any option to slave the rate to an external source. I just use the Spdif In on the sound card (which is on the inside part of the computer) coming from the Spdif Out of one of my monitor speakers, and tell audacity to use the Spdif/In of my card. Are there any other settings I should be looking at.

Oh, and when I'm doing the speed changes, my math turns out around 8.9% (very close to the 9.1 that you are suggesting) so I'm very much leaning towards it being what you say. I just find it odd that audacity show's 44.1 for both independent settings.

[Randyman...]

Odd. I know some low-end soundcards seem to only run the SPDIF at 48K. But if the Soundcard and Audacity both indicate 44.1, then I'm not exactly sure where this wold be happening. I'd highly suspect the Soundcard and/or its drivers ATM - See if you find any simular issues at the HT Omega Striker forums (if there is such a thing).

As you are importing (re-recording) the audio, I assume you hear it at the correct speed as you monitor from the PC?

As a last ditch effort, you could use Analog to dump the project into your PC (onboard analog audio inputs generally aren't very good)

:cool:

[Kowalski3500]

I've never had monitoring turned on on the PC, since I have the Roland monitors, I didn't see the point in listening through crappy Logitechs. And I had also figured (before asking here) that it was some sort of latency problem and didn't wanna put more load by having monitoring turned on :P. But yeah, once the project is recording, I can see the current time thing on Audacity falling behind the one on the Multitrack, and once I'm done and play back (after I note the times, so I can slow it down based on percentage different) it'll be fast.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't know exactly WHERE to effect or see the samplerate of the soundcard itself, only the audacity settings so far (running XP btw)

Double EDIT: From http://www.thinkcomputers.org/v2/index.php?x=reviews&id=468 "- Coaxial or Optical S/PDIF Input for recording, monitoring, bypassing digital audio from external sources at 16-bit/44.1kHz, 16-bit/48kHz, 24-bit/96kHz sample rate"
Now, where to pick the actual settings?

[Randyman...]

This might sound counter intuitive, but try setting your Audacity Project to 48K and try to re-record the signal. I'm thinking the Soundcard is changing (resampling) the BR1600's samplerate to 48K, and Audacity is flagging it as 44.1K. Although this will likely result in increasing the issue, it might just be crazy enough to work ;)

Beyond that - I'd begin scouring the HT Omega Striker forums (if there are any).

:cool:

[Kowalski3500]

No luck with 48khz in audacity (although it DID speed things up). I tried 32000 as well, and that went in the right direction, but trying 22050 resulted in the same thing as 44.1. There is the option to type your own sample rate in audacity, but I think I need to find out how to control the SPDIF input sampling rate (that quote from the review is actually on the official site, after some digging).

There are no official forums, but there is a help requesty form thing. Perhaps I should consider using it. I donno though, if you peruse their site, you get a sense that it isn't written by native english speakers, (as I also e-mailed asking about their CA-1 cable, the spdif-2pin, and got a kinda butchered response), so I donno how much help that's going to be.

In the control panel for the sound card, I DID find options for the spdif OUTPUT, but not the input. I could choose 44.1 48 or 96 there. I wish that I could find the same controls for input. Is there some kind of like, software that might help me do that? Or like, driver level controls via device manager or something? I'm just not sure where to look to modify the soundcards sampling rate, since the official website says 44.1/16bit 48/16bit and 96/24bit.

EDIT: I've tried a program called Soundcheck, from Passmark, to try different sampling rates and stuff. Turns out from the program, that my stuff is receiving 8.15% too little data @ 44.1 (I tried other supported formats, 48@16bit and 96@24, and got nearly the same results). So when I go into audacity, record, and use the change speed function, and put in -8.15% it pretty much exactly offsets the difference.......weird.

[Randyman...]

Weird indeed. Since I'm not familiar with Audacity or your Soundcard, I'm pretty much out of ideas ;) If you ran Cubase or Nuendo with RME hardware, I could certainly shed some light on this :)

Keep us posted...