how to record on your computer?

[Garystrat]

Hi Ryan

Going back to your original point, providing your computer has sufficient resources, you should be able to compensate for latency within Audacity and most DAW's for that matter. Most modern computers will have enough CPU power to run something like Audacity with you playing against a backing track, if resources prove to be a problem it may be possible to help your situation by adding more RAM, which is quite reasonably priced these days.

Some computers share their RAM with graphic cards and this can reduce the speed of processing, as a general rule more RAM tends to speed up most machines, particularly if you are multitasking or using memory intensive programs. By todays standards Audacity is not very demanding on resources, but it certainly wouldn't do any harm to see how much resource it is using, there are normally tools within the operating system to do this, but I'm not overly familiar with MS Windows systems these days.

Here is a link to a YouTube video showing latency correction in Audacity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7l4xIGcE_k

As others have said having the the right drivers and a proper audio interface is not going to harm your case, a good audio interface can help because it take over some of the processing in converting your analogue signals to digital (computers can only work with digital) you may see this referred to as a DAC (digital to audio converter).

Once a system is working properly, I like many prefer recording via computer as it is very visual as to whats going on.

Hope this helps.

Gary

[Stu's Dad]

If you've got the latest version of Audacity, click the Help tab and then 'Manual (in web browser)'. It gives quite clear instructions for latency settings for USB or mic recording. You need something like an external soundcard, I think I got mine for about £6.99 from Amazon.

Best wishes,
Len

[Ryan]

Hi All,
Thank You to everyone who replied to my question about recording on my computer, you've all given me lots to think about.
Cheers
Ryan