Terrible Live Recording results (with Movie Studio though)

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:42 PM

I know this is listed under Vegas Pro, but this was the only section I saw dedicated to Audio and my problem is audio specific.

I've been having some bad latency and possibly distortion of timings with live recording in Vegas that I have some questions about. I will give a brief background of the equipment I'm using first. [Edit: Very likely my inexperience with audio makes this a user-error problem as much as anything else.]

I have a Sterling ST55 connected to a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 with a USB connection to my PC (Windows 7) which I use for amateur recording of karaoke song renditions, YouTube videos, and (eventually) podcasts. I think I have only recently recognized my mistake of using Sony Vegas to record from my ST55 for live input over the last two years, though I suspect some other factors as well. I suspected some general I/O slowness of my PC's harddrive but didn't have another system to compare until recently, which tempers that suspicion.

Not only does the voice get off sync/behind the music track I'm singing to (some very bad latency) but also even dragging the audio track afterward and trying to align it down to the second reveals some seemingly inexplicable timing mismatch issues to where the voice will only stay synced with the track for a few seconds and then gradually meander, no matter how much I adjust or even stretch/shrink (not clip) the timing of the audio track to compensate.

As I said I chalked some of that up to my old PC being slow, but with a brand new blazing fast Intel build OC'ed (running Windows 10) and newly to Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 14.0, I'm still getting the same results in Vegas. So yesterday I switched to the less desirable (to me) interface of Audacity and it instantly gave me better results, but I'm still getting some small amount latency offset to where the voice is falling behind, and I'm still unsure whether my attempts at alignment in Audacity (which sound "okay" - but I don't know how much I can trust my untrained ears) are actually keeping the voice in sync with the music track. I've heard of some latency issues with the 2i2 (1st gen) possibly related to the Windows driver which I'm not sure how to overcome.

[continued]

Comments

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:44 PM

I'm having a difficult time sorting out whether - aside from needing a better choice of software for recording on Windows - I should also suspect the 2i2 or ST55 and attempt to make some software-side adjustments (Vegas has a manual latency adjust slider that I've never used & always left to "automatic"), or if this is purely a software issue. I have had to use the Windows driver in order to record from the Line inputs of the Scarlett though, if that is significant (I will upload a screenshot later).

The ST55 and 2i2 (1st gen) I have are a few years old but in great condition and have only been lightly used.

Could anyone give me any suggestions for what I can do to overcome the recording not aligning with the soundtrack?

Former user wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:46 PM

Are you recording the voice separate from the music? What sample rate and what format? (WAV, MP3, etc)

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:51 PM

Here is what my settings look like in Vegas Movie Studio 11 on my old PC running Windows 7. It is my new Windows 10 PC which is using VMS 14, which is configured similarly. The official driver for my Scarlett 2i2 is installed on both machines, but I've seen no Scarlett specific option and thus had to choose the Windows Wave driver to get Line 1 (where my ST55 is plugged in) to show in the drop down menu. Is this the wrong way to do that?

Former user wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:58 PM

There should be an ASIO driver for the Focusrite. I use Vegas Pro though but I assume Studio supports ASIO. Don't know if that will fix the problem, but it is definitely superior to Classic Wave Driver

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:58 PM

Are you recording the voice separate from the music? What sample rate and what format? (WAV, MP3, etc)

Yes, I'm literally just using some mp3s that provide karaoke audio tracks I ripped from YouTube videos, just for home enjoyment. I'm not sure what the sample rate of those mp3s are. Maybe that's the whole issue... It wouldn't surprise me since I'm a complete novice at audio.

I wonder why it would be so much better in Audacity though if that were the case.

 

 

Former user wrote on 1/31/2018, 10:59 PM

Oh yeah, convert those things to WAV files before trying to mix them with other audio. MP3s can be all over the board for sample and bitrate. They are a delivery format.

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 11:01 PM

But I'm seeing how it would totally make sense to not use one audio track sampled at 41KHz and a voice track at 48KHz, to make up an example. Would that cause the meandering, out-of-sync issue I described?

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 11:02 PM

Oh yeah, convert those things to WAV files before trying to mix them with other audio. MP3s can be all over the board for sample and bitrate. They are a delivery format.


Gotcha. Simple but very useful advice. :-)

Former user wrote on 1/31/2018, 11:09 PM

And get the ASIO drivers

 

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 11:16 PM

And get the ASIO drivers

 


I'm not sure what else I need to do though, since I just downloaded the official Gen 2 Scarlett 2i2 driver from their website yesterday, which supposedly works with my Gen 1 2i2, for my Win10 PC. Maybe I need the older Gen 1 driver but even with my Win7 PC with a Gen 1 driver, I'm not seeing an ASIO option. I'll do a little bit of targeted research. Maybe I need to see if Focusrite has any forums.

jnielsen7 wrote on 1/31/2018, 11:46 PM

And get the ASIO drivers

 

I may revert to the Gen 1 driver tomorrow, but does anything look amiss in these Win10 settings for the driver (which I fetched two days ago from Focusrite's website)?

Someone suggested to me if I couldn't find an ASIO option in my Audio settings tab dropdown to install a program called asio4all too, so I might give that a shot when I get a chance tomorrow. Out of curiosity, do you have a screenshot of what I should see in the audio dropdown options for Vegas (assuming you have a Scarlett of some variety)?

ryclark wrote on 2/1/2018, 6:15 AM

You won't see any ASIO driver installed in any of Windows Sound setup pages since ASIO completely bypasses Windows. Hence the possibility of low latency using a ASIO equipped audio interface. I don't have a Focusrite but use an ESI USB interface with ASIO drivers. It shows up as shown in the attached image in Vegas's Audio Device preferences.

 

Also when recording from a live mic you should be using the Scarlet's 2i2 Direct Monitoring mode to hear your live mic feed mixed with the audio playing back from your recording software.

Former user wrote on 2/1/2018, 8:42 AM

Ryclark beat me to it but here is my screenshot. I have the M-Audio device which uses ASIO for lower latency.

rraud wrote on 2/1/2018, 8:59 AM

Yes, you want the ASIO device driver for 'overdubbing'.. an old-school pro audio term for listening back to a per-recorded track and recording another on top of it (aka, sound-on-sound), or on another track. BTW, my late-great former neighbor, Lester Polsfuss pioneered this technique.

Former user wrote on 2/1/2018, 9:11 AM

Rraud, that is cool. We use to have a Magnavox reel to reel recorder that did the sound on sound. So it was pretty much a one shot deal. If you screwed up, you had to start all over. But fun technology.

jnielsen7 wrote on 2/1/2018, 10:19 PM

David,

If I were with you in person I would shake your hand vigorously in thanks. The ASIO driver is exactly what I needed. Oddly it had never shown up in the drop down in my old instance of Vegas on Windows 7, and with my new instance I must have forgotten to restart Vegas after installing the Scarlett 2i2 Driver (I actually am sucessfully using a Gen 2 driver with my Gen 1 2i2 with no problems); and so though I didn't see it yesterday, on a hunch I restarted Vegas and the ASIO driver showed up this time. Now the timings are perfect. Many, many thanks!

Josh

ryclark wrote on 2/2/2018, 6:44 AM

David,

If I were with you in person I would shake your hand vigorously in thanks

And mine as well? 😉

Former user wrote on 2/2/2018, 7:08 AM

I am glad it worked out. Enjoy!!