Sonar LE and Hydrogen

[christofloffer]

me and a friend have embarked on a project, all very rough and ready for now as its a new style for the pair of us. i have Hydrogen, Sonar LE, a Samson Q1U mic and a Boss ME-25 (mostly just being used as a direct line-in). all very budget obviously but for the time being it should serve its purpose. i set up a drum track on hydrogen to use as a base, transferred it directly into sonar, all well and good at this point, then we tried to record his djembe to it and could not get the thing to line up. we assume latency and recorded the drums from the speakers and sure enough its not right.
we also tried a click track on a keyboard through the ME-25 and had the same gap so i guess its that the onboard sound gear for the PC is just not up to it, or could it be something to do with the hydrogen-to-sonar part?
while its not a great issue for the time being as its just us finding out if it works, it is rather annoying. for now we are going to have to record the drum track through the speakers so that while the quality would be poor, at least everything would then be on the same latency and allow us to experiment more. if it could be cured then it would allow us to get a bit deeper into it before deciding what gear would suit us best. it would certainly be nice to get some tidy tunes that we could mess with. we just dont want to go forking out for something that we later find is not quite right.

[Skol303]

That does sound like a latency issue to me.

As a quick fix, have you tried matching up the tracks manually? Ie. view them both as waveforms (showing the shape of the audio) and nudge one of the tracks forward/backwards until they line up.

They'll both be at the same tempo (if it is a latency issue), so this should work.

[dannybuoy]

Not sure what you mean by 'recording the drums through the speakers'?

It's been a while since I dabbled with Sonar, but I've used crappy built-in sound with ASIO4ALL drivers set to 10ms latency, playing back a sampled drum track and recording a guitar into it and all went well. If you are using built-in sound without ASIO4ALL, install it and you will have a slider to adjust your latency.

[christofloffer]

[quote name='dannybuoy' timestamp='1447199220' post='2905815']
Not sure what you mean by 'recording the drums through the speakers'?
[/quote]

i mean playing the drum track out loud on hydrogen and recording it through the mic to get it onto sonar. rather than directly importing it from hydrogen into a track. i used to do it with audacity for years as i couldnt get the files to transfer. its a pain but in the grand scheme of things it might be tolerable.

i have seen asio4all before, i will give it a try.

i did try to manually knock the track forward but i couldnt get the movement fine enough. it annoyingly steps quite a long way and i havent figured out how to get it any finer. most places i have looked at just say to buy bigger better software and drop the LE version of sonar. which is fair enough but it depends on what we end up doing as to what would suit us best, neither of us are very techy.

[lowdown]

[quote name='christofloffer' timestamp='1447233665' post='2905898']
i did try to manually knock the track forward but i couldnt get the movement fine enough. it annoyingly steps quite a long way and i havent figured out how to get it any finer.
[/quote]

That sounds like you have 'Snap to grid' on.
You can move/nudge files as close/sample accurate as you want.
Check your manual for where to look for the snap on/off icon.

Sonar LE will be more than good enough for your needs.
It's the Audio card (or lack of a decent one) that is causing your problem.
As said above, Asio4all drivers will help a bit.

Still better to get an Audio Interface (USB), with Pre-Amps built in, in most cases this will include Midi I/O.
Around the sub £100 mark should get you something decent and more than ample for your needs.

[christofloffer]

[quote name='lowdown' timestamp='1447243366' post='2906009']
That sounds like you have 'Snap to grid' on.
You can move/nudge files as close/sample accurate as you want.
Check your manual for where to look for the snap on/off icon.

Still better to get an Audio Interface (USB), with Pre-Amps built in, in most cases this will include Midi I/O.
Around the sub £100 mark should get you something decent and more than ample for your needs.
[/quote]

snap to grid!

that has freed up so much. i gave it a try and sure enough i can jiggle the tracks to match up properly. i can set a loop up properly thanks to that now too. that should get us rolling for the time being if nothing else.
i downloaded asio4all too, just trying to get everything talking now.

an interface is most definitely on the sooner rather than later list. along with a set of reasonable headphones as we have flute and sax to throw in too and the volume needed to hear the tune and the sax is a bit much. at the moment the wishlist is enormous and expensive, which is why we want to get a bit further in before spending out on gear. nothing better at spoiling the mood of a session than fighting against gear or software.

so nice to get good advice right off the bat, i think i am going to like it here.