Hi,
I just finished watching the video on DAw's which was great. I like to mention a bit on the biggest problem with DAW's - "latency". I previously only experianced this problem when I was recording Midi in real time using my Roland GR-09 guitar synth which produced a significant amount of latency, nearly a secound. It was able to fix the problem by sliding the track to the left and quantising the track. I never had much of a problem with my audio recordings before untill just recently. I had a friend of mine drop around a Samson G-Tracks USB Microphone to try in January of this year. As I had just written a new song I decided to use this device as my interface to PC as it has both Microphone capabilities and a input for intruments. I was not expecting any latency, the thought never occurred to me of this problem. So I went ahead and put down six tracks, 4 x guitar and 2 x vocal tracks. I did not realy listen too it too closely untill I had finished the sixth track as it was only a demo to see how I would arrange the song etc. But to my horror I noticed the timing in places where way out. At first I thought it was me not keeping in time to the midi metronome while recording or I flicked my lighter too many times :). So I decided to create a simple midi drum track to keep time with (kick, snare & high hat). This I thought would be easier to hear so I would keep in time. Well I put down a guitar track and discovered I was still out, I tried agian thinking it was me, but the secound take was stll out. The next take I really concertrated on my timing and new I was in the groove this time. When I played it back I discovered it was still out. Luckily I had recorded the third take into a seperate track and had not deleted the secound recording of the guitar. When I played both guitar tracks back, with out the midi drum track they where in perfect time. Thats when I realised I had a big latency problem so to check it out I plugged the out put of my sound card into the intrument input of the Samson G-tracks Mic and recored the Midi drums into a seperate track. The result was nearly a 16th of a secound out, very distint with the drums. I wondered at how I could fix this problem, I needed to gauge the exact amount it was behind so could slide each track back into its exact timing position. The way I did this was by cutting a secound off the begining of my recorded audio of the drums, marking and writing down the exact starting position of this track. I then zoomed in and slid the track to the left so it was in perfect time with the midi track (trial and error). Once I was happy with the result I was able get an exact measurement of the amount I had slid it to the left. This amount then was used to silde each recorded track back into exact position. I noticed Alan didn't elaborate on the prcedure to fix latency so this info could be of some use to anybody with the same problem. As the G-tracks is a seperate audio PC device (like a sound card) it was easily accomplised.
But if you only have one Sound device installed on your PC you could try having the midi drums output comming from the left channel only and record it back into the right channel to gauge the latency you have without the feed back problem you would normaly get when doing this. Note some sound cards my freak out with this and still howl, if you find you can't do this then I suggest insatalling a second sound card into your PC to fix this. I know IRQs conflicts can cause problems with this but you can reserve the cards IRQ, and you can always diable your com ports and printer port to free up IRQ's with they are not being used. I have an older P111 800, which still has ISA slots and I have a Roland Rap10 and a Sound blaster live both installed in this pc which I use to record my midi into audio.The Roland card still to this day has the best midi voices I have heard, the standard GS wavetable that comes wth XP comes no where near the sounds this card produces.
I have an example of the latency problem I encounted while using the G-Traks USB mic on my web site for you to hear at
http://www.rodroger.com/rr/rodrogers_bands_artists_news.html
The sample is about half way down the page (look for the guitar icon) just under my demo with the huge latency problem, have listen to this Demo as well to see the problem I caused myself by not paying attention. You may ask why I have posted this demo with the problems on my site. Normally I would not have but as this song is in dedication to a lost little friend at the end of last year and was recorded not for fame and fortune but for pure love.
Its like putting a wooden cross on a grave untill you have the head stone. I am not ashamed of the result, even though it has huge problems, as it was recorded from the heart.
My final thought here is if you are using a USB device (not the fastest PC interface as interfaces go), check it's latency first and work out what you need to do before proceding with your recording so you don't screw it up like I did. :)