Back in July, I came up with this hypothesis that latency was TOTALLY screwing with my vocalists after doing a few little voiceover things myself. I felt that the ability of the singer to hear themselves was all screwed up. The delay from their own voice in their head and the headphones causes a distinct comb filtering that makes everything sound totally NOT distinct.

Well, I'm happy to report that after testing this over and over that zero-latency headphone mixes are the ONLY way to go. I will never go back to recording vocals with any noticeable latency. Singer comfort seems to increase dramatically, complaints about headphones have dropped dramatically, the results seem to be better, and good singers who struggled with pitch seem to make miraculous improvement. (Crappy singers are still crappy, unfortunately.)

There are still some singers who aren't in love with using headphones as this can is not necessarily a person's natural way of hearing themselves. I've found the singers that HATED singing with 96 samples of latency in their headphones now seem about 10x happier

Getting FX In Zero-Latency Land

DAW Monitoring
Many DAWS will allow you to record vocals via direct monitoring and then route that signal to the reverb. In this case,the latency will delay that reverb signal. This is the exact same thing as pre-delay, which is a very common reverb control anyway. In fact, for big vocal reverbs (Celine Dion-type stuff, it's required anyway) so a little more won't hurt.

Hardware
I bit the bullet and paid $220 for a Kurzweil Rumour hardware reverb. This requires the ability to route signals out of your interface or it requires a hardware mixer. In either case, you need the ability to send signals and bring them back in on a new channel that can be heard. Users with 2-channel audio interfaces are out of luck.

Conclusion

Find a way to record vocals with zero latency and never look back. It works.

You can read all about my venture into the computer super hell here: Home Recording Computer Doom: IRQ Conflicts, ACPI, and Misc Disasters

What I'm about to tell you would have saved me about 40 hours of headaches and would allowed me to make hundreds of dollars that I missed from canceling two recording sessions.

The Problem
The easiest way to solve problems on a recording computer is to format the C: drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows. While this won't fix every problem, it knocks out about 90% of them. The only trouble is it can take hours to reinstall Windows and software on a “normal” computer. For a recording computer, each and every plugin and virtual instrument must be installed and licensed. This can take DAYS!

After that, you still lose all of your settings. When I first formatted Cubase SX3 for the first time, it was almost like learning the program over again at times. Cubase is SO configurable that I had forgotten just how custom I had made it.

The Requirements

• We require a perfect backup of the EXACT file system with everything from settings to serial numbers included.
• We do not want ANYTHING running in the background with in Windows. In fact, we don't even want to install any software within Windows for backing up programs. We definitely want to keep Windows as clean as possible.
• When problems do arise, the restore process must be quick. It's not a big deal to take 30 minutes or less to restore a computer while the band runs down to Burger King.

The Solution
I took the time find a great method of making sure that the C: drive of my recording system can be restored fast. After installing all recording software, plugins, cd burning software, synths, etc my C: drive can now be restored back to fully functional status in a little over 10 minutes.

Bart's PE-Builder.
First you'll need Bart's PE-Builder. It is basically a temporary operating system that runs from a cd-rom so you can do stuff that can't normally do while Windows in running. (That's the robo technical explanation!).

DriveImage XML V1.21 plugin
DriveImage is an open source script that is normally written for Windows that allows you to create perfect images of the data on hard drives. The Windows version has two problems. 1) You have to install it in Windows (we are trying to keep our recording computer ultra spotless if possible) and 2) Since it is loaded within Windows you can't restore data onto the C: drive (because Windows is already using the C: drive to run. This is similar to why you have to restart your computer to run Scandisk on your operating system drive.)

Since we can't use the Windows software, there is another option. We can use the DriveImage XML V1.21 plugin for the Bart PE-Builder.

Windows XP Installation CD
You'll need the Windows XP installation cd that you used to install the operating system initially.

Extra Hard Drive
A spare hard drive that you don't mind erasing. This is the one downer for this setup. You'll need an empty hard drive or a hard drive that you don't mind erasing the data on. If you are like me and have 5 extra hard drives sitting in your desk drawer, this won't be a problem. It could be a problem for others. There may be a workaround for this, but it'll require a nerdier dude that me.

The Concept
The Bart PE-Builder uses the Windows XP CD to create a “boot disk” with all kinds of utilities on it. By default, it does not come with the DriveImage plugins, so well want to add that when we create our boot disk. After we create the boot disk, we'll restart our computer. If your CD-ROM is selected to boot first the Bart operating system will be loaded and Windows XP will not. It'll be a little slow, but that's because all the files are on a cd-rom and not on a much faster hard drive.

Once we have the Bart operating system loaded, we'll open up the DriveImage program. From there, we can make a copy of the C: drive and copy it to our new “extra” hard drive. As mentioned before, DriveImage can not simply put the backup in a folder. I guess it ignores the folder structure of Windows. When we backup the files, it will overwrite anything on the hard drive. I've found with my setup, that it won't matter much. I ended up keeping the hard drive in my computer, but I unhooked the power (I don't have any other use for the hard drive other than backing up and restoring the C: drive).

In Practice
All these new terms and such may seem complicated, but the end result was super simple.

Put the CD in.
When the new, cd-rom based operating system loads, open the file backup software.
Copy the C: drive to the blank hard drive.
Done

The Result
On my first try everything went perfectly. I had no trouble. My back up file was 9GB. They are broken into smaller files so you could burn them to a CD or DVD. I was really surprised how quickly it backed up my entire drive. It couldn't have taken more than 3 or 4 minutes. It may have been faster than that.

I tried a test restore. Again, it only took a few minutes to perform the restore. I restarted the computer (after taking the cd-rom book disk out) and my restored image worked perfectly.

At the moment, I don't have all my Cubase settings exactly how I want them, and I still haven't installed all my cd burning software and a few little plugins I occasionally use. When I get my rig set up exactly how I want it, I'll make a backup of the image and burn it to DVDs in addition to my extra hard drive. The next time I have major issues like I did this week, it should be as simple as giving power to my backup hard drive, firing up the computer with the Bart Book Disk in the cd-rom, and then restoring the C: drive using DriveImage XML. Removing the boot disk and restoring the system should be doable in 5 minute!

This method will entirely rule out any issues within Windows and make troubleshooting MUCH faster. If there are still computer issues after a restore like this, it's highly likely that the problem is hardware.

Conclusion
I could have saved myself 4 days of trouble and 2 canceled sessions if I would have simply backup up my C: drive with Bart's PE-Builder and the DriveImage XML plugin. This is an INCREDIBLE feature for me especially since I've had to major computer issues within the past month. Now I know that if I run into trouble, I can have my computer back up before the band even makes it Burger King.

Note: I intentionally didn't give directions on exactly how to do this because there are sites that already do a better job than I would have done. I simply wanted to give the overview and the concepts. The instructions are super easy for anyone who can read, so I guess that rules you out. Ha ha

The Problem
On Monday I recorded a metal band. It was just one song recorded in robo speed in one evening. Everything went great. The next morning, I sat down to mix the sound. The sound was all garbled like the sound you hear in Cubase SX3 when you add a plugin while the song is playing. Then clicks and pops would immediately consume the sound. There was no way I could mix! So much for having that mix done last Tuesday. (It's Sunday and I hope to get started today!)

I need to point out that this problem was using my remaining Delta 1010 audio interface which has been reliable for me since 2001.

The War
You heard me say “clicks and pops”. That immediately suggests issues with latency or CPU power. I wrote a big article on that here: Home Recording Computers: Clicks, Pops, and Latency.

However, the symptoms didn't quite add up for this to be a super simple fix.

• My recording computer is super clean. I have Windows XP SP2, Cubase SX3, CD Burning software, virtual synths, plugins and that is about it.
• To my knowledge, nothing changed from Monday night when I recorded the metal band to Tuesday morning when the problems began. I did notice that when I attempted to back up the folder for that band onto my 3rd hard drive, the computer had locked up. This was VERY odd. On restart is when all the problems began.
• When I experienced these dreadful audio problems, Cubase SX3 would have trouble playing just a single track, but it was clear that the noises, clicks, and pops increased as the track count increased.
• There was no noticeable difference in the amount of noise, clicks, and pops when I slapped a few high CPU usage compressors on the 2bus.
• Playing the same wave file in Cubase or Windows Media Player had drastically different results. Media Player had no problem playing back the file. Cubase did.
• The CPU usage in Windows and in Cubase SX3 (F12 shortcut) never went over 50%. I wish I would have looked to see how much CPU usage Windows alone was using with no other programs running. This CPU usage issue is a big one. Usually when there are clicks and pops the CPU is being overloaded.
• Changing the latency made absolutely no difference.
• I thought that maybe this Delta 1010 was having big issues too. In came my new Presonus Firestudio. I heavily debated fixing the problem with the Delta 1010 or trying out the new Presonus Firestudio with the hope that the problems would be fixed. That caused it's share of problems in regard to Presonus not exactly going out of their way to make their requirements known, but that's another blog altogether. It turns out that the problems were exactly the same for both the Firestudio and the Delta 1010.
• I had this exact same problem one month before. Simply formatting Windows fixed the problem. I had the feeling that there was a simple solution of changing a single setting or maybe overwriting a file, but it seemed faster to format than it did to look for that one file. This time around, the problem still existed even with a Windows format. This made me think the problem was hardware related.
• I thought I had errors on my hard drives. I ran both Scandisk within Windows and chkdsk via command line. This did not solve the problem.
• At this point, I was a bit frustrated. It didn't appear to be a software issue in Windows and it didn't appear to be a hard drive issue. In other words, my file system wasn't the problem. This is where it gets scary. I had to go deeper than anyone EVER wants to go. I had to deal with IRQs.

IRQs – Interrupt Request Questions...no Quarters....no Quail.
Okay, as I hope heading illustrates I don't know much about IRQs. I don't pretend to. Anyone who enjoys IRQs enough to learn what they really do should consider getting out more. I'm the biggest hermit nerd I know of and want NOTHING to do with this IRQ business.

The way I see it, the IRQ is the little ports deep inside the skull that connect to the computers brain. If there is a bottleneck and too many merchant ships are trying to dock in one port, the goods don't get moved in and out as fast in that particular port even though the overall brain isn't really having problems. (Note: This is my current understanding. If someone really knows what they are talking about, please nicely correct me. This blog isn't intended to be a 100% fact. It never is! Ha ha! It's intended to be a journal of my experiences and thoughts that may help others solve their problems.) So, if you think you may be experiencing IRQ issues, heaven forbid, but a more nerdier dude than me! There are many tutorials that will bore your eyes right out of your sockets!

So, it was my guess that I was having an IRQ conflict. Too much data was moving in and out of IRQ X and that was causing a bottleneck. Of course, I have no idea how or why this would have changed over night. Something clearly did!

The way I understand it, the IRQs in XP are handled “virtually” and automatically. (This is called ACPI) In other words, Windows XP is pretty smart and can generally figure out the best place to put each device to make sure there are no bottlenecks. When I viewed my IRQ settings in Windows XP I did see that I had A BUNCH of components on IRQ 11. However, I hear that because Windows does all the IRQ handling via ACPI, these numbers really don't mean a whole lot. GREAT!

The only way to change the settings in XP is to change from ACPI to “Standard PC” mode. This can cause major problems, but if you are dealing with IRQs you are probably already screwed anyway. It's a gamble worth playing with. The idea is to switch “manual mode” using Standard PC so you can set the IRQs in your BIOS yourself. (In English, this means you send some of the cargo ships to San Diego, some of the ships to Los Angeles, and some of the ships to San Francisco instead of cramming them all into LA automatically using Windows). Switching to Standard PC can require a format. It can also require that you change yo ACPI settings in your BIOS. This is hardcore stuff. I'm not explaining it in great detail because I don't feel like I'm qualified to. Again, see some robo-nerd website if you are considering suicide...I mean, switching from ACPI to Standard PC.

Back To The War
Now that we have poorly defined this IRQ conflict business, let's get back to My Struggle. (Good book title for the average home recording guy! Too bad it's already taken!) Anyway, so I start playing around with this Standard PC stuff. I try to manually set my IRQs in my BIOS. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get the results I wanted. I must have missed a setting or something. I found that my BIOS didn't react the way I had expected in regard to setting IRQs. (I had done this once before back in the day and that BIOS was much easier to use). I said “SCREW IT, F@%K, @#%^% 6^$#@#@$$” (imagine the dad from “A Christmas Story” or maybe Joe Pesci in “Casino” or any other movie.) I then went back to ACPI. Of course, this required a formatting because things go REALLY weird. (A “Standard PC” driver for my ATA controller decided it didn't want to go away and therefore my 2 audio drives were not accessible). A formatting fixed all this junk.

After this junk, I re-installed Cubase SX3, the drivers for my new Presonus Firestudio, and fired up a mix. It had a little trouble playing, but we seemed to be 90% back in business. I hadn't done a single Windows optimization because I figured I'd be formatting 17 more times that day. After doing the usual Windows XP optimizations, it appears that I'm 100% back in business. Frankly, I've been too scared to fully test!

Conclusion
This reminds of that part in Grumpier Old Men where Rocky's trainer is 150 years old. He tells a story about how he is 200 years old and every morning he'd wake up and eat bacon and drink beer. For lunch, he'd eat bacon and drink beer. For supper he'd eat bacon and drink beer. The son says “What's your point, dad?”. The Penguin from the original Batman series replies “POINT? There's no point! I just like that story!”.

I didn't learn a damn thing from this whole episode except that I need a way to backup / restore my rig fairly quickly in the future. (That's a future blog). I have no clue how I fixed the problem. All I know is I wasted almost 4 days working on this damn problem and had to cancel 2 sessions.

Windows (especially Windows XP) is a fairly powerful program. We all sit around and complain about this or that, but in the end, it is quite a miracle that the thing works at all. I couldn't imagine the # of lines of code that were hand written by someone to write a program as huge as Windows. Bla Bla Bla. Windows has a big problem. Windows has to be all things to all people. Since Microsoft has about 95-96% market share, it's easy to see that this huge user base will have drastically different needs. These needs are often on the extreme end.

For example, I LOVE monitoring through my favorite recording software, Cubase SX3. In other words, when a vocalist is doing his/her thing, I like to run the signal from a mic to the preamp to my audio interface. The signal goes into my recording computer, into Cubase SX 3 where I add compression or reverb, back out to my audio interface, and into the singer's headphones. Because of this, I need an operating system with extremely low latency. In other words, I need a computer that can get “data” in, process it, and send it back out...IN A HURRY!

In reality, this is quite a ridiculous request. The notion that a computer can process data fast enough that the human ear can't really tell the difference is actually quite amazing. While we all don't have to hold hands around a camp fire and sing thanks to Microsoft, I think it's important to at least consider just how impressive this is and also understand what a performance hog monitoring through a PC can be when setting up our computer systems. Essentially, we are pushing our recording computers to the max and it's very important that we do everything we can to make it easier on our recording computers to do what they need to do.

I'd guess that the only Windows users that need to get audio in and out of a computer that fast are audio recording people. This explains why no stock soundcard that I've ever encountered is anywhere near low-latency (but I've heard a few rumors). 99.9% of the population has no use for low latency, but that doesn't mean it's not a huge deal for us recording types.

I'm sure there are a zillion other extreme examples that I simply have never encountered on a PC because my usage of a PC is either normal stuff (email, word processing, etc) or hardcore audio (as explained above). Because Windows has taken the “all things to all people route”, they've made their program exponentially larger and therefore increased the likelihood that things can go wrong.

The Windows Ability To Trash Itself
It's common for people to report that they got X error when installing or using a piece of recording software. Some simply assume that they bought a piece of junk program. Honestly, I couldn't imagine any software company releasing a program that did not work at least on some systems. It would be business suicide to release a program that worked for absolutely no one!

This brings up an interesting question:

Why would a program work just fine on one computer but not even finish installing on another computer?

Well, the layman answer goes like this. With every piece of software that is installed on your computer, little settings deep within the Windows code are changed. (We commonly refer to these changed settings as the “Registry”.) Some programs are worse than others, but the more programs that are installed and the more that these deep pieces of code are changed, the less likely that your computer will run smoothly...or at all.

I'm not talking about viruses or spyware. It's a given that these malicious programs are obviously not doing your computer any favors. I'm speaking purely in terms of the quantity of software installed. When computer manufacturers are testing software they have written, I think it's a given that they are testing it in ideal circumstances (at first anyway). I'd assume these to be super clean installs of Windows with nothing on them that could cause problems.

After recording programs have all their bugs worked out of them in the ideal testing areas, companies often release Alpha and Beta testing to see what happens when more people in more environments in completely different computer situations do with the software. Of course, there will be problems and these problems are reported.

Let's talk about these registry settings. Somewhere there is a setting to turn X feature on or off. What feature? Who knows! Make up one. If Photoshop decides to change this feature to off. What happens if Cubase needs this feature on? It gets confusing. This is an overstatement, but I think it clearly illustrates the point. The more programs, more chances that all the little features and instructions deep within Windows mangled beyond use for the low tolerance world of home recording.

Increasing The Odds Of Software Reliability
It's impossible to make every program in the world work perfectly on every system. However, we can do things that make sure that our recording programs work as reliably as possible. The easiest way to ensure that recording software works on your system is to start out with a system that most closely resembles what the programmers started out with: A clean install of Windows and only install software related to recording. My system consists of Cubase SX3, cd burning software, mp3 conversion software, plugins, samples, and maybe Sound Forge. That's it!

I don't have to worry about a graphics program causing some conflict somewhere that stops Cubase from working. I don't have to worry about a fancy video codec changing some setting somewhere that effects something that effects something else. I have ONLY the required software and nothing more. I don't even consider my recording rig to be a “computer”. It technically is a computer, but to me it's more of a “Cubase machine” since I don't do the things I would normally do on my home computer with my recording rig (email, write articles, etc). I don't even have internet on my recording rig. That's another article altogether, but I find the convenience of knowing that my recording rig has a 0% chance of viruses and such, and therefore no need for resource hogging anti-virus software (in addition to the fact that I get to disable all networking services in Windows), is worth the inconvenience of having to transfer downloaded files, updates, etc with my flash drive. (There are benefits in the “focus” department as well. I like the fact that I can't check email on my recording computer. It's just one less distraction.)

How Do I Start With A Clean System?
There are a couple of ways to start out with a totally clean system. You can start clean even if you use the same computer for recording and your standard home stuff.

So if you have a new computer dedicated entirely to recording, format the thing. (See my article “Format Windows XP On Your Dell, HP, Gateway, or other Name Brand Computer”). It's better to start from scratch than to use the uninstall feature. You WILL notice a difference in computer power. Just make sure you have all your drivers ready.

If you'd like to start recording but don't have a separate computer for recording, no problem. You'll want to setup a “dual boot system”. This means that when you start your computer, you will be asked whether you want to load up Windows #1 or Windows #2. When you want to record, you can then select Windows #2. Of course, Windows #2 is your recording rig. You'll notice that it runs much faster than Windows #1 (with all your standard computer stuff running).

Conclusion
For maximum reliability and performance, it's your job to make sure you provide a solid platform for you recording software to be installed on. Getting all the components to work in a recording rig is tough enough as it is. The last thing you need is to be bogged down by a a corrupted version of Windows. Start clean with a new computer or a dual boot system and make your life infinitely easier.