Recording Audio

rain the producer


what do I need to change inside of Sonar.

Rothchild


Hi Rain, looks like you might be making some progress but I'll take a punt to help you out.

As you've deduced you need 2 midi leads, 1 goes from the out of the mm6 to the in of the 144 and the in keyboard to the out of the 144. You also need a pair of jack leads to go from the main audio outs on the yamaha in to the line inputs on the 144. Finally you need to plug the output of the tascam in to your monitors / amplifier.

That's the easy bit. Now you have to make some decisions. Do you want to monitor 'directly' through your soundcard or are you happy that your computer is beefy enough to do realtime monitoring. (I'm going to assume the latter. ;-))

First open Sonar and create a midi track, set the input and output to the 144, when you play the key board you should see midi activity in the meter and the little icon on the toolbar. On the 144 turn the monitor mix knob to 'input' and turn up the 2 gains until you can hear the signal from the yamaha ok. (generally the yamaha volume should be turned right up)

Now, back in Sonar, create an audio track (and while you're at it a buss, which you'll call 'master' route the output of this buss to the 144 stereo out put) set the input of the track to the tascam stereo input and the output to 'master' arm the track to record and continue playing the keyboard. You should now see the audio meter on your newly created audio track dancing around. Pick a loud patch on the yamaha and jam along whilst adjusting the input gain on the tascam so the peaks of your audio are dancing around -18 on the meter in Sonar.

Now's the fun bit, on the tascam turn the monitor mix dial from 'input' to 'computer' and switch on 'input echo' on your audio track (and disarm it from record). Now the audio that's coming in is being processed by sonar and put back out via your master buss. If there's a noticable delay between pressing the key and hearing the sound go to 'options / audio' and reduce your latency by setting a smaller buffer.

What you've got now is midi control and audio monitoring. You should be able to arm your midi track and record your part. You can then tweak your midi around to make sure it's perfect, then arm the audio track and record the output from the synth at your leisure.

You can also control soft synths using the midi you've recorded, insert a new synth using the synth rack, and then change the output of your pre-recorded midi track to the synth.

Your system is about as simple as it gets so spend a bit of time digesting this, think about where the signals are flowing and where you're able to apply control to them and you should be able to scale this up to more complicated set ups.

As was already mentioned, MIDI is not Audio. Get your head around this concept and it'll all drop in to place.

Child

I just need the basic set up. As in inputs and outputs and the way it should be set up in Sonar. My keyboard does not show up as any source in the menu unless I hook it up through the USB but I do not want MIDI, (something else that I am still trying to figure out how to set up correctly)

bmdaustin


Are you using ASIO or WDM? Do you have the Tascam interface selected as the audio and midi interface within Sonar (Options/Audio Options/MIDI)? Do you have your tracks assigned properly with the Tascam being the output of the Master? Are your tracks routed to the Master or the Tascam? Either will work, but  it helps us to understand how you have things organized.

If you're using ASIO, raise the latency level in Options/Audio. There's an ASIO panel there, or a button to get to the ASIO panel IIRC.

If you're using WDM, run the wave profiler so Sonar can set the optimal settings fro you.

Are ou trying to hear sounds from VST synths or your Yamaha or both?

There a re a lot of possible fixes to your problem, depending on what it is. Once you get the initial setup done and get the hang of setting up tracks with VST synths, this all gets a lot easier a nd a lot more fun.

rain the producer

jhughs


Did you ever try going into the Options>Audio and setting the latency for as high as it will go (slider to the right) to see if it clears the pops and crackles? 

I'll retry this  tomorrow but last time it was as high as possible their was too much latency.

Norrie

rain the producer


http://www.4shared.com/photo/RzpShzll/audio_after_Sonar.html
After Sonar

During Sonar
http://www.4shared.com/photo/jsorYO0f/audio_during_sonar.html

Ok So from the two photos there we can now see your computer is off doing something else and is not able to handle the streaming of real time audio ( at the momment )

Have you done what the Dpc latency checker guide has said and started to disable things like your Lan card etc untill the latency is lower ?

My System is hiting arround 9us that will give you an Idea of the difference.

So we now have the answer to your pops and clicks you will need to get this sorted first before thinking about doing anything else.

What OS are you usesing ? XP Vista or win 7 ?

I would advise doing a google search for daw tweeks for your os then doing al the ones you find until you get all of the spikes in the latency checker right down and like I said do what it says in the DPC help file

This Will get you back on track

The other option open to you is to contact Studio Cat http://www.studiocat.com/2/index.php/Consultation

Jim Roseberry is a top guy he did some work on my system just a few weeks ago and it has never run better I would recomend him to any one

Your best bet is contact Jim and have him do the work on your system

Let us know how you get on

Norrie