mic delay, mixer, and recording

Just talk about kJams stuff with each other, describe things you did that worked, talk about your setup, anything that doesn't fit into the other forums!
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ericos
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Joined: Mon May 11, 2009 7:46 am

mic delay, mixer, and recording

Post by ericos »

I've been looking around the forum for ways of eliminating the mic delay that occurs when routing the mics into the mac and then out to the speakers. The consensus seems to be that you need a mixer. Audio out from the mac (kjams) into the mixer. Then from mixer to speakers.

This would prevent the mic line from going into the computer eliminating your ability to record in garage band.

It seems to me like my choices are: 1) eliminate the delay but be unable to record, or 2) put up with the small mic delay and have the ability to record in garage band.

Is there any way to do both? I don't know a lot about mixers, but is there some way to take the sound out of the mac and into the mixer. Then take the sound from the mixer to the speakers but BACK TO THE MAC at the same time (mic only) so it can then be recorded?

Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Eric

dave
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Re: mic delay, mixer, and recording

Post by dave »

If you have an analog mixer and a MoTU mixer (i recommend an UltraLight) then yes you can do what you're asking

your mic delay can never be eliminated if you are doing digital mixing, because there is no such audio chip that can process in "real time", every one that exists has a "latency" of at least a few milliseconds, there's no way around it (until someone invents the flux-capacitor micro reverse-timeflow chip)

but with both an analog and a digital mixer, you can wire them together, keeping all the channels discrete, and pipe everything back into garage band

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jfbiii
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Re: mic delay, mixer, and recording

Post by jfbiii »

Do you really need the digital mixer for garage band? I feed that port with an analog signal from my mixer and broadcast it live on the net. Seems like you should be able to just take the mix from the analog mixer and have garage band accept it from the audio line-in port. That said, I have almost no time behind the controls of garage band and haven't tried to record that way, so I could very well be wrong.
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dave
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Re: mic delay, mixer, and recording

Post by dave »

if you want a single-channel mix-down of ALL your inputs (all mics plus kjams) then sure, you can skip the digital mixer

i was assuming you wanted multi-track recording

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