Help for a home recording novice...

[coasterbass]

Hi,

My band recently did a live recording and I volunteered to try and mix together the final product. I'll say at this stage that I have no experience of any DAW or of attempting this type of project previously.

I picked Reaper as a DAW as it seemed comprehensive and cheap to get startted with.

My problem is that once I've loaded the files into Reaper and try and listen to any of them I get a weird 'underwater' echo-type mishmash sound. Having spent 6hrs+ now trying to adjust every setting in Reaper and in my soundcard setup I'm still stumped so thought I'd turn to you guys for help! My assumption is that this is connected to the samplerate(?) but I don't really know what the problem is

- The files I'm handling are 48Khz/24bit .AIFF files.
- My Audio Device Settings are set to DirectSound; Output Device = Speakers (soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme); Sample format = 24bit; Samplerate 48000Hz; Buffers 8x1024.
- Project Settings - Project Sample Rate = 48000Hz
- On my computer I'm running a soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme card. The device management properties are set to 24bit, 48000Hz.

What have I missed and what am I doing wrong?? Please help and stop me wasting another 6hrs fiddling around.
Here's the killer... one evening last week I managed to get it working and I could listen to the tracks perfectly so I know it CAN work. But the next time I opened Reaper it was all wishywashy underwater echos again. Gutted.

Thanks
Nick

[spiderjazz]

Few quick suggestions which might help:

1. Get an ASIO driver to run your sound with, this driver should help [url="http://www.asio4all.com/"]http://www.asio4all.com/[/url]. You'll change this in reaper under option-preferences-device
2. Under Asio configutarion, set your buffer length to the longest in can go. You don't need a short buffer length once you have got to the mixing stage.
3. You don't really need your audio settings so high, 44100 and 16bit should work more reliably.

Try these, and if they don't work, I'll try and think of another few suggestion.

[OldG]

If the soundcard is set to 'what U hear' - change it to stereo...... and don't have any tracks in Reaper armed to record. very brief will expand later.

[coasterbass]

Thanks guys. I really appreciate your help.

Spiderjazz - I had presumed that I needed to set everything in Reaper to 48KHz/24 bit because the AIFF files I'm dealing with were produced with those specs... is that not the case?

[spiderjazz]

You shouldn't have any problem loading up with higher quality files at the lower resolution. It shouldn't make a difference either way, but it's a handy way to troubleshot by setting it to more standard settings i.e. 44.1khz/16bit is CD quality so on the off chance that your soundcard isn't supporting the higher resolution, the lower one should work.

[coasterbass]

Its working!!!!
It took a while to sort the settings but it seems that I needed the ASIO driver and there was no problem with the sampling rate after all.
Thanks very much for your help with this - its really appreciated.

[spiderjazz]

Good stuff, the ASIO drivers are great alright, definitely seem to sort out a lot of the compatibility issues.

Best of luck with the mixing, I'm sure that will bring it's own set of problems

[coasterbass]

24 tracks.
A 2.5hr long gig.
6 vocal mics
2 ambient tracks.
Never mixed anything before

Should have it done by tomorrow....

[51m0n]

You definitely SHOULD set the system to run at the same rate and bit depth as the original files.

You do not want to load the system any more than necessary and its having to downgrade the sample rate and bit depth to output for no good reason (assuming your soundcard can handle that bit depth).

24 bit is absolutely required for getting the best out of a digital system when recording (esp drums etc), since it gives you massive headroom, so you can give far more room for peaks at the top end of the volume range. Downgrading to 16bit on the fly is definitely not lowering system load. Just lowering the quality you are hearing.

[spiderjazz]

[quote name='51m0n' timestamp='1331036870' post='1566586']
You definitely SHOULD set the system to run at the same rate and bit depth as the original files.

You do not want to load the system any more than necessary and its having to downgrade the sample rate and bit depth to output for no good reason (assuming your soundcard can handle that bit depth).

24 bit is absolutely required for getting the best out of a digital system when recording (esp drums etc), since it gives you massive headroom, so you can give far more room for peaks at the top end of the volume range. Downgrading to 16bit on the fly is definitely not lowering system load. Just lowering the quality you are hearing.
[/quote]

I didn't realise that, but thinking about it it makes total sense about the files having to be downgraded. My bad

[51m0n]

[quote name='coasterbass' timestamp='1331036081' post='1566571']
24 tracks.
A 2.5hr long gig.
6 vocal mics
2 ambient tracks.
Never mixed anything before

Should have it done by tomorrow....
[/quote]

Not if you're doing it right