monitoring while recording for punch- ins

islandsounds wrote on 8/20/2001, 11:51 AM
I can hear audio through Vegas 2.0 when I am in record-ready, and hear audio on playback. But when I am actually recording, I see the meters moving and see a waveform being drawn, but can't hear audio. It then plays back fine.
I need to monitor through Vegas for punch-ins, so I can hear existing audio up to the punch, hear the new audio being recorded at the punch, and then hear the existing audio after the punch. Monitoring the playback of the existing track on one mixer channel and the new part on another mixer channel is a very clumsy workaround, which was suggested by Sonic Foundry. Most (if not all) other recording devices have an "auto input monitor," which switches from playback of the existing track to input monitor while actually recording. I can't figure out how to do this with Vegas. The "simultaneous play and record" option is checked in my options menu.
I am using a Frontier Designs Dakota and Montana soundcard. They work fine with Sound Forge 4.5 and I have no trouble hearing audio while its being recorded.
If I can do this with Sound Forge I should be able to do this with Vegas, right?
I have read the tech bulletin #1065, and according to that, you can't monitor your input while recording. If this is the case, then this software is useless for doing any kind of recording that requires punch-ins. Punch-ins are how I do fixes, just one phrase here or there, instead of telling the client, you played a wrong note, so you'll have to do the whole track again. I don't think that will work!
I appreciate any ideas on this; thanks in advance for advice!

Comments

pwppch wrote on 8/20/2001, 2:27 PM
None our applications permit monitoring in software. That is, we don't send the input directly to the output.

What the Dakota offers is a hardware monitoring of input. The current Wave drivers for the Dakota do not permit the monitoring of input while output is playing IFF you have the input routed to the corresponding output.

When you record and playback in Vegas, the Dakota drivers disable the monitoring rout you set up in the driver. There is nothing that Vegas does or can do about this.

You can alternatively route a lightpipe input to an alternate lightpipe output dest or to the spdif output. As long as you are not playing back through the output monitoring port in Vegas, you can monitor your input.

The new Dakota WDM beta drivers do permit the input and output to be mixed in the hardware/drivers. In this mode, the hardware/driver will mix lightpipe channel X input with the lightpipe channel x output. This is the input mix mode they discuss in the readme notes for the Dakota WDM Beta drivers.

There are however issues with the WDM drivers and Vegas.

- With WindowsME, Vegas will be limited to seeing only the first 10 stereo pairs of the Dakota. This is bug in Windows. Windows emulates the Wave output/input ports for all WDM based drivers.
- There is not sync start between input and output when using the Wave Emulation for WDM drivers. This is because most hardware vendors implement this internally to the driver. The wave driver spec does not define sync start between input and output, so the wave emulation of Windows does not perform such a sync start for the driver.

Hope this helps.

Peter