Buffer, Recording delay or...?

[noisenet]

Hey All,

I've been doing some simple recording, simply recording live guitar tracks over a 2 track mixdown WAV. So in my project there's one Stereo Wav and one single guitar track. I'm mic'ing an amp so no amp modeling software, or any plug-ins for that matter.

 

What I'm finding is when I play the part while recording, what I'm playing feels and sounds dead on the groove. I'm not monitoring my guitar through the system at all, I have the fader all the way down. I'm listening to the WAV through the system, playing along with it and monitoring my guitar from the amp.

 

When I listen back, however, almost everything I'm doing sounds a bit rushed, ahead of the beat.

 

Using the I/O plug I tried testing the I/O latency using the Ping method outlined here - http://www.logicprohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=284790#284790 - the plugin reports at +1 Sample. I don't think this isn't enough to cause an audible shift in groove, LOL!

 

When I recorded this stuff, I had the I/O Buffer size at 256 - could this be enough to cause my stuff to be recorded ahead of the beat? Seems to me this would make it behind the beat if anything.

 

Right now I can't test it (residential neighborhood, later in the evening) so I just wanted to bounce this off of ya'll & see what you think.

 

For the record, I'm running Logic Pro 9.1.5 in 32=bit mode on a Mid 2007 20" iMac, 2.4GHz Core Duo II, 4Gigs RAM, running Lion 10.7.2 I'm recording to an external 7200RPM drive via FW800. Logic and OS are, of course, on internal 7200RPM drive. My I/O is an M-Audio MobilePre USB (I'm on a tight budget).

 

Also, I've run into this issue on this system (Logic 8) in the past. I've tried different Recording Delay settings but never to a consistent result. Could it be that this cheap I/O is really only off by +1 sample?

[triplets]

Try recording with Software Monitoring enabled and use headphones from your interface's phones output.

Bring the buffer down to 64 and the recording will be much better.

Make sure recording delay is at zero.