Microphone delay when recording in Windows 7

Hi guys, I'm a recording musician and unfortunately I use a microsoft  OS, here's my best advice to all of you... Load 2 Operating systems Windows 7 and xp for recording.

I run Windows 7 for one reason only and that's because its 100% more stable than xp...

Hope that would be of help to all of you.

Altimately the best way to go is Apple MAC for recording if you can afford it.

Hey guys... I had the some issue with the USB mic and the realtek hd audio device.  Browsing through the net found the solution in another forum.  It's software-based but it works like a clock!

I'm copying the posting below.

Enjoy your mic without latency!

Victor

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Hi,

I think found of a solution to our problem. (Maybe it is a workaround but it works)

I wanted to use my USB wireless microphone just to sing and to hear my own voice so  I searched without luck for days for some sort of a program or driver.

I understand that if microphone is connected through USB to my PC

And My PC is connected through HDMI to receiver which has all the speakers attached,

so no way the analog signal from microphone can go all the way to speakers without being converted to digital and than back to analogue.

So the only way is to minimize signal conversion delay as much as it is possible.

Luckily one guy wrote audio repeater program.

http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html

Here is direct link:

http://software.muzychenko.net/vac410.zip

Simply unzip file, DO NOT INSTALL the application. You are only interested in 1 file. There are 2 folders x64 and x86.

They have identical content (audiorepeater.exe and audiorepeater_ks.exe)

I have Windows 7 64 bit, so I selected x64 of audiorepeater.exe.

There select:

input device - (USB Microphone)

output device - (ATI HDMI output)

local buffer - (50 ms)

priority (realtime)

These settings might differ (depending on how fast is your hardware)

Press start. And ... voilà, you can hear yourself almost without any delay. In my case this works fine with karaoke software.

I tried audiorepeater_ks.exe and set all the settings as with audiorepeater.exe but when I start karaoke software I don't hear music. Only my voice.

If somebody could get this working let me know how. Apparently audiorepeater_ks.exe is a bit faster as it uses some kernel options (Need to be verified)

Sergey

This guy is a genius! After days and days of searching I finally see a solution.

I just want to project voice through my computer without horrible lag and this fixed it. THANKS!!!!

This do NOT, I repeat NOT solve the problem.

The problem is software-related and that means "Windows 7", NOT any third party driver.

Microsoft dont care to solve this, because their corporate customers dont get in touch with this issue.

The SOLUTION anyhow is to either:

1. change to XP which is stable enough to not have this problem
2. buy a mac

So is there really no solution for this after two years???????    I like Win7 for most things, but the microphone always had a delay that made it unusable.  (Well, it was usable unless I didn't want a monitor, which is no way to do any real recording.)  Two years ago I was using an analog mic plugged into the mic input going to the Realtek audio built into my motherboard. The delay was terrible. Now that I'm trying to use the PC for more than web browsing and playing games I tried it again this week.  Still a terrible delay.  I downloaded the latest Realtek drivers.  Still a delay.  I downloaded the latest display drivers (which I know shouldn't have anything to do with it, but what the heck?) and that didn't help.  I tried the suggestions over the past 25 pages of this thread (many of which I tried two years ago) and that didn't help.  So I tried buying a USB mic instead of a standard mic.  Still a terrible delay.

So really... is it really impossible to use Win7 for audio recording?  Is there really no way to get rid of this god awful delay other than buying a Mac?  That is ridiculous!   Dual booting WinXP is a pain and frankly it's ridiculous that Win7 can't do what WinXP did with no problem years ago!

Am I missing something here?  Do I have to give up on Windows as nothing but a gaming OS and switch to Mac for the serious stuff?  Or should I try Linux, since dual booting that is pretty painless?