Recording both microphone and music from Sonar

rbowser

I looked through the Sticky posts about the various settings to try when there's a problem recording sound. I don't have that problem--not exactly.

I use an external sound card, an audio/MIDI interface. I've made good vids with Cam Studio, picture and sound are fine. I've made adjustments to settings so sound and video synch up, I get the best picture, best sound.

But I want to make tutorials for Sonar, the audio recording program. I can record over the mike, explaining what tools I'm using in Sonar - but there's no way to play the music tracks I'm demonstrating in the tutorial--because that's not from the mike, that's sound being played in Sonar.

How do I manage to record both? Maybe Cam Studio can't make the kind of music program tutorials I've seen, but I'm sure hoping it can.

rbowser

quantumcop

I had a similar problem, but I quickly realized that (at least in Windows machines) it is possible to have the sound from the microphone played back through the speakers as it's being picked up. You just have to go into your sound settings and unmute the mic. Then, if you set CS to record from your speakers, it will pick up both the sound from the program and the sound from your mic. You just have to make sure that the volume levels are roughly the same, otherwise one might drown out the other.

I've also tried recording from the speaker using CS, and recording the voice from the microphone separately using a different program (Audacity, in my case), but this caused a strange problem. By itself, CS would only record the speaker audio, but when I started recording the mic through Audacity, CS suddenly started recording the mic audio as well, even though it was only set to record speaker audio.

In any case, I hope this helps you out. If anyone has any ideas on the strange problem I have with Audacity, I'd like to hear what you have to say.

rbowser

Thanks for the reply, quantumcop

There are two complications in my set up which I'm not sure CS can handle. Except these complications are not at all unusual for home studio musicians - that's why I have hopes that someone, somewhere can pass on instructions for how they got it to work:

1) I cannot use the built-in sound card on my laptop for playing back music I compose in Sonar. The card is incapable of providing anything but a garbled playback - and that's because apps like Sonar need cards that run on Asio drivers. So the "Speakers" setting in CS doesn't do me any good when I'm trying to record music which is playing in Sonar as I make a CS video. And that brings us to the second issue:

2) I have to use an external sound card. I use an Alesis io|2. That totally replaces the built in sound card. Any sound playing on the computer, including my music in Sonar, is piped out through the Alesis outs which are plugged into an amplifier with speakers attached. My microphone is also plugged in to this unit.

I can make fine sounding CS vids using the mike which is plugged into the Alesis, but that bypasses any sound which actually resides on the computer.

I suppose I need to route signals through an outboard mixer and somehow pipe the sound, both music and mike, back into the computer in some way that CS can pick up.--But still haven't had a successful experiment for all that.

Hummmmm. Thanks again for your reply. I should probably try this question at the Sonar Forum also.

rbowser

rbowser

Solved! - I posted this same question at the Sonar Forum, and someone with more expertise came up with the answer.

Solution: Take the audio outs of the external sound card (Alesis in my case) and plug those back into the unit's own line in jacks, along with the microphone. The mix knob has to be set completely away from Direct, otherwise there's feedback. But with some experimenting, I was able to get a clean mix of both mike and music while using Cam Studio to record a screen in Sonar while playing music. Slick! Now I can make Sonar tutes for a friend who needs them.

quantumcop - Maybe something like the above will help you out.

rbowser