Re: [Traverso-devel] Some remarks / missing features

[Jonatan Liljedahl]

Nicola Döbelin wrote:
> Hi Jonatan,
> 
>> I have a hardware studio here which I work a lot in (yes, you know,
>> real devices instead of a computer! ;) and I often do exactly as
>> above, I have some signal on a channel which I send to some
>> effects, then I want to record it but I want to hear the effects
>> while recording, so either I send only the dry channel input to the
>> tape recorder but still listen to the effects, or I send the
>> monitoring channel from the tape recorder to the effects and listen
>> there.
> 
> I do the same (using my 56+56 channel inline mixing desk and 2 Alesis
> HD24 recorders, plenty of real buttons and faders around here ;-). I
> usually split the signal at the direct-out connectors and record the
> dry signal. Then I use the mixing desk to set up a monitor mix with
> external effect units. For mixing I transfer the tracks from the HD
> recorder to the PC. That's why I have no clue how to do the
> monitoring stuff in software only. Would you really use a reverb
> plugin for monitoring? What about latency? Wouldn't a high-quality
> software reverb (e.g. convolution) introduce quite a bit of delay
> between the incoming and processed signal? Smaller buffer sizes, on
> the other hand, would increase the risk of dropouts during recording.

I've never used a DAW software to record live instrument input so I
don't know how much trouble the latency would be, but I guess it could
be a problem if the monitoring is lagging behind the input.

Note: I just came to think about that sometimes you also want to record
through plugins, i.e. record the processed signals. At least when it
comes to dynamic processing like compressor and limiter.

> AFAIK high-quality sound cards provide hardware monitoring, which
> yields the lowest possible latency, but does not allow to process the
> monitor signal at all.

> This may be different for DSP hardware,
> though. What hard-/software are you using in your studio?

I have never had any problems with latency in DSP hardware, even if
there is a small one in some DSP algo's in some devices (like
pitch-shifting and such, but I often take advantage of this to create
experimental feedback loops in hardware to synthesize new sounds =).

But with a soundcard with hardware monitoring, couldn't one monitor the
dry input *and* the output from the software effects? In most cases, I
guess it doesn't matter if the effect comes a bit after, especially in
case of reverbs and delays...

I use a 24 channel 8-bus mixing desk and a 8 track HD recorder, and a
rack of external effect units. I use it mainly to record compositions
made with homebuilt synthesizers and strange machines, and I do the
mixing on the hardware mixing console, downmixing into a 2 track
stand-alone CD-recorder. I don't have any good quality soundcard,
otherwize I would be downmixing it to my PC.

-- 
/Jonatan    -=( http://kymatica.com )=-