Cannot hear my guitar when recording

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defaria
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Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2020 7:05 pm

Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by defaria »

I'm very new to this so I will start here. Feel free to point me in the right direction...

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04, Audacity 2.3.3 from repo.

Here's what I'm trying to do - simply overdub some acoustic guitar onto a pre-recorded mp3 file that I imported. I've started Audacity, imported the mp3 and connected my guitar to an MAudio MobilePre, and plugged that into the USB of my Linux box. I have a decent input level set that barely clips into the red and my volume on my acoustic up at 10. I hit Shift-R to record a new track. I have my headphones plugged into the MAudio's headphone jack. I hear audio from the imported mp3 but I don't hear anything from the new track while I'm playing thus I can't record in time. After I stop recording I can playback and I hear both tracks now. My new track is extremely low even though I have the recording level maxed and the level on the MAudio at a decent level.

It's hard to read some of the things in Audacity since my monitor's a UDH and I've scaled up the text so I can read things and Audacity doesn't properly render the Audio Host, Recording Device, etc. properly

Image

But they are set to:

Audio Host: default (Displays ALSA)
Recording Device: default
Recording channels: 1 mono
Playback device: default

My sound card is Starship/Matisse HD Audio Control Analog Stereo if that matters. I've played around with things trying to get this to work to no avail.

What can I do to get this to work? This should be dead simple but it's always a stumbling block. Let me know if there's any info I can provide to help solve this. It's really frustrating.
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Re: Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by Basslint »

Pardon my silly reply but have you tried switching monitoring on by pressing the button on your MAudio MobilePre?
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defaria
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Re: Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by defaria »

What I've learned from another forum is that this particular model lacks that button. As I understand it, it's software-driven and while the Windows and Mac users have support for pushing that button thru software, the Linux driver lacks that functionality.

It's a just and old unit that I borrowed from another musician. Looks like it's time for me to go shopping. There, bought a Behringer U-phoria USB audio interface.
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Re: Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by Basslint »

Wait, I think there might be a way to do it without changing your gear! I use Ardour for recording, not Audacity, and if you use that instead you should be able to avoid needing the monitoring button.
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Re: Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by bluebell »

defaria wrote: Thu Aug 13, 2020 7:36 pm I'm very new to this so I will start here. Feel free to point me in the right direction...

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04, Audacity 2.3.3 from repo.

Here's what I'm trying to do - simply overdub some acoustic guitar onto a pre-recorded mp3 file that I imported. I've started Audacity, imported the mp3 and connected my guitar to an MAudio MobilePre, and plugged that into the USB of my Linux box. I have a decent input level set that barely clips into the red and my volume on my acoustic up at 10. I hit Shift-R to record a new track. I have my headphones plugged into the MAudio's headphone jack. I hear audio from the imported mp3 but I don't hear anything from the new track while I'm playing thus I can't record in time. After I stop recording I can playback and I hear both tracks now. My new track is extremely low even though I have the recording level maxed and the level on the MAudio at a decent level.

It's hard to read some of the things in Audacity since my monitor's a UDH and I've scaled up the text so I can read things and Audacity doesn't properly render the Audio Host, Recording Device, etc. properly

Image

But they are set to:

Audio Host: default (Displays ALSA)
Recording Device: default
Recording channels: 1 mono
Playback device: default

My sound card is Starship/Matisse HD Audio Control Analog Stereo if that matters. I've played around with things trying to get this to work to no avail.

What can I do to get this to work? This should be dead simple but it's always a stumbling block. Let me know if there's any info I can provide to help solve this. It's really frustrating.
Edit -> Settings -> Record -> check the 2nd box from top.

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Roosje
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Re: Cannot hear my guitar when recording

Post by Roosje »

Hi Defaria.
This should be straightforward in principle, but you may have serious latency issues, depending on how you are set up.
What are you using as sound out? Hopefully the UGM96

Anyway, you can enable sound passthrough in audacity by going to:
Edit -> Preferences -> Recording
And ticking "Software Playthrough"

This will let you hear your guitar when recording or monitoring.
To monitor, click the little mike to the right of the transport controls (play record etc) where it monitors the mike levels.

You may need to play with the ms to buffer setting in that same preferences screen to make latency acceptable.
Again, hopefully you can select the ugm96 as your output in Edit -> Preferences -> Devices
Which should reduce latency a lot.
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