Odd Problem

I recently changed interfaces from a M-Audio mobilepre to a Mackie Spike and since getting the whole thing set up within Audition 2, I have been getting problems when I am recording that never occurred with the mobilepre.

When I record with the metronome on for timing, I have found that, on playback, the take plays as if it was recorded (completely in time) slightly in front of the beat.
At first I thought it was my eagerness with my new device that was making my playing a bit more excitable and I scrapped a lot of takes for being out of time, but when I moved the track forward a certain amount, it was in time as consistently as it had ever been with the mobilepre.
I tried recording a few takes in different tracks and they are ALL that tiny bit in front of the beat.

I did have to change the sample rate from 44100 to 48000Hz because everything that I'd recorded before using the mobilepre was played back about a tone and a half higher on the Spike, including the metronome playing alongside it.

If it is a sample rate problem that can't be fixed, is there a way to automatically have the track pushed forward (by the increment that I manually do it) after recording?

It is quite unlikely that it is my timing that is the issue because I upsampled some of the older 44.1KHz sessions in order to record new music in incomplete songs and the upsampled tracks are perfectly in time, while the new Spike recorded ones are in front of the beat.

Thanks,
J.

If it is a sample rate problem that can't be fixed, is there a way to automatically have the track pushed forward (by the increment that I manually do it) after recording?

You should be able to set the latency compensation for your Spike in the ASIO control panel for it. In the pretty silly* guide they provide with the Spike, they don't even mention this in the setting up instructions - but the ASIO control panel, which allows you to adjust the latency, will allow you some compensation for it.

In AA1.5 it was rather easier to compensate - there were settings in the Multitrack control option that would let you achieve this automatically, but AA2.0's ASIO driver does things somewhat differently, and those compensation tools aren't available.

You have to bear in mind that the Spike is only a USB1 device, and as such is relatively slow in communicating with the PC - this invariably increases the latency, and some manufacturers achieved better results than others in this respect. Newer USB2 and Firewire devices have rather less of a problem with this - the latency figures are lower to the extent that you don't generally notice metronome timing errors, I believe.

The one thing that you might like to try (although I don't know to what extent this will help this particular situation) is the free ASIO4ALL driver - which controls latency and the ASIO buffer separately.

*Yes, it's silly. Any so-called manual that goes on about not running a Spike with a HAL9000 computer and only mentions the ASIO control panel at all in conjunction with Traction - where anybody not using this software could easily miss it - is silly. You will find references on page 63 and 70 only.