Friends of mine do a lot of collaboration via various forums and I have consistently had an issue with latency. How it manifests itself seems kind of bizarre to me, but it may make perfect sense to you.

I am on an early version of Cool Edit Pro and what happens is I first import the track I want to use as my backing provided by another player.

I record my guitar part on a new track while playing back the original track. When I play the two back to analyze it, I find that single note stuff seems to stay in time, but when I start playing more complex material such as arps or chording, my track actually plays back AHEAD of the backing track and as I go back to single note stuff, it seems to come back a little bit closer to linked up. It is not consistent as the rate of change is dependent on the complexity of what I am playing... That just seems bizarre to me. Any ideas what might be going on here? I am missing out on a lot of fun collaborating because of this... Thanks in advance.

Boggs

Boggs, I'm not familiar with that software, so I'm afraid I can't help you.

The only time that I have ever heard of an audio timing difference like this has been when the DAW software was set to catch it's timing from MIDI. Like JJ, I am not familiar with Cool Edit..... I didn't even think that it had MIDI.

Bill

It's difficult to diagnose your particular problem without knowing your soundcard capabilities, computer speed, RAM, etc. But Cool Edit Pro is a long discontinued program and you may not even have the correct version to run on your current platform.

As much as I hate to recommend that people spend money, I think it's probably best in this case to purchase Adobe Audition, which is the direct lineage to Cool Edit Pro. It should be an easy transistion and can be found for less than $150.00.

Other applications that would probably fit the bill would be Cubase SX SE ($99) and Pro Tools LE (depending on your interface).

Good luck!

Thanks for the info!

One thing you should be aware of is that only a few programs have record compensation, even though many have plug-in compensation.

What happens is this: Suppose your interface has 10 ms of latency going in, and 10 ms coming out (about average, especially for a USB 1.1 interface). So say a drum note hits at 100 milliseconds into a song. You hear it at 100+10 ms due to the latency. Now you play your guitar note at the EXACT same time you hear the drum hit, but it takes another 10 ms for the guitar note to hit your sequencer. So, now there is a 20 ms offset between the actual drum hit and the guitar note; you hear this when you play the two tracks back.

As most players will lay down a track to a reference (e.g., drum part), all the subsequent overdubs are at least "in time" with each other, and you can always slip the original reference track late to compensate. But if the first track is drums, then you play percussion over that, then you play guitar while listening to the percussion and bass while listening to the guitar, the timing gets further and further off.

FYI one of the reasons I use Sonar 6 is because it now includes record compensation. Tracktion has included this for a while; I'm not sure about Cool Edit, but I doubt it.

Haven't used that program in a long time,and I don't have it now, but it seems like there's a bit rate selection on each track, and you may have it set differently on one, or the other, and that's having some effect on the latency. Like you've got one track set to 16 bit resolution, and one to 24 bit. I Remember having that same problem, and it is fixable in the preferences somehow.