MIDI Drum track records onto analog track. Please help!

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 6:21 am

Hi there, I'm a rank amateur and fairly new to this malarky, having previously used such astounding high end software such as PCDJ and the Windows Sound Recorder... I recently decided to upgrade and am now struggling to get to grips with Cakewalk Sonar 7, which may well have been the costliest mistake I have ever made! The problem is this:

When I record guitar/analog input through my multi-effects unit, mixer and REALTEK HD analog left input in Cakewalk, it either overlays a loud, distorted, out of time MIDI drum track (which is playing simultaneously while I record) onto the analog track or else it overlays an extremely loud, annoying click track. The guitars are buried in there somewhere, but it's an unusable mess. I've turned the metronome off, preffering to record to MIDI drums but I can't stop them bleeding into and ruining the guitar tracks.

I've a feeling that this may be some godawful software problem, but am loathe to un and reinstall the soundcard drivers as last time I was left without sound at all for a couple of weeks, turning my setup into a pile of completely worthless junk.

Please, please help. I'm going native here. Mad

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 11:10 am

Is REALTEK HD your built in sound card? If so, upgrade the driver to an ASIO one. ASIO4ALL works on most built in sound cards.

Also make sure you are recording from the correct input on your REALTEK HD. Most cards default to recording what you hear. (That what is sounds like your problem is from the description) You want just the line in. Right click on the volume icon in the task bar, and select recording properties. It may be a little different depending on if you have XP Vista or whatever, but you should be able to find it.

If you really want to do decent recording and avoid these sort of head aches (there will be more to come with the built in sound card) purchase a decent sound interface. M-Audio makes several. Presonus is also good.

Steve

Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 6:03 pm

Thanks for the advice. I downloaded and installed the ASIO4ALL driver but it hasn't made any difference. I'd heard about the 'What You Hear' problem but don't know how to fix it (and have spent hours tinkering with Cakewalk to no avail). My volume control panel is acting up and I have no idea why. Instead of the select buttons it has mute buttons and the sliders are greyed out. I think I might have to uninstall the Realtek driver. Realtek HD is onboard, but it's always worked before without this problem and given good results so i'd like to keep it if possible. Any other ideas? I appreciate the help.

Thanks.

Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 10:10 pm

You only have two inputs, mono L and mono R. You want to record on one channel and click track on the other. You are not going to get good results with an onboard sound card. To be fair, you will go stark raving mad and blame problems on everything but the onboard card. Sonar is crap, my cables are junk, where did this annoying guitar come from, etc.

Get a better audio interface/input device.

At least pan the channels and quit hatin' on Sonar Smile

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:38 am

Thank you both for trying to help me. I've finally managed to fix the problem by muting everything except mic in in the volume control recording properties tab (mute had replaced select for me). No doubt i'll be back on here with more questions soon though!

Thanks again. Wink

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