TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Reducing Live 'Echo'

Scenario:  You've clicked "Live On," are talking live through your computer's sound card, and you notice a slight delay in your headphones.

That delay, or "latency" is caused while your computer is processing the live audio. Depending on your sound card and computer, it might be noticable enough to be distracting. In Haiku®, this delay can be made almost imperceptible if you have anough CPU power by following these quick instructions:

1. Go to the SoundPlay preferences panel.
2. Select "Decoders" under "Plugins"
3. Select the Audio Input decoder.
4. Click the Configure button. A Window will popup where you can set the amplification (gain) you want to apply to the input. This isn't the option we want, but take note of it, because it may come in handy if you ever need to digitally "goose up" your input level.
5. You will also see 3 options for buffer size. By default the second one is selected. Changing it to the first one (small buffer) will decrease the latency.

In our tests this change makes the latency echo almost imperceptible.


ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

1. As the host of the live Friday Night Listener Party on Haiku®RADIO, and a non-lover of headphones, I actually prefer to just have the speakers set low enough not to feed back into the mic. Using that approach, even a significant amount of latency isn't all that noticable.

2. If you're broadcasting over-the-air and not over the Internet, the best approach is to run both your mic and TuneTracker's output through a mixer, in which case you won't encounter any latency at all because the live signal doesn't need to be processed through the computer. That also lets you introduce the output of many other live audio resources into your programming in real-time, coming from CD players, tape decks, etc.



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