Live input monitoring
Hear your input through the track's effects while you practise or record.
Monitoring sends a live input through an armed audio track’s effects, level, pan, sends and buses to the output, so you hear the guitar through the amp or the voice through its compressor while you play. It works whether the song is stopped, playing or recording, and the recorded take stays dry so the effects remain yours to change.
When to use it
Practise a part with the sound you will mix it with. Dial in an amp or a vocal chain before committing a take. Record while hearing the song and your processed input together. Monitoring is also the simplest way to check an input is reaching the right track before you press Record.
Controls
The speaker button
Arm an audio track and a speaker button appears beside Arm. It starts off; turn it on to hear the input. Disarming turns monitoring off, and arming again does not restore it, so you choose it each time. It is a session setting, not part of the project.
While stopped
With the song stopped, monitoring runs the track’s chain live without advancing the timeline, so clips do not play and nothing moves. You can edit the effects while you practise and hear each change at once.
While playing or recording
Existing clips play alongside the input. During a take the speaker button stays live: switching it off silences your monitor without interrupting the capture, which is useful when a chain starts to feed back or you want to hear the raw signal for a bar. Stop ends the take and returns to stopped monitoring.
Input and output
The input is the Recording input chosen in Audio settings, shared with recording so the device is opened once. Changing the input while monitoring reconnects it. The track’s chain adds whatever latency its effects need; pitch correction, for instance, adds 20 ms before the device and browser add theirs.
Latency and buffer size
What you hear trails what you play by the full round trip through the browser, which grows with the buffer size. Measured on a USB interface: about 19 ms at Low, 42 ms at Balanced, 72 ms at High and 220 ms at Max. Low is the setting for playing along; from Balanced up, many players prefer the interface’s own direct monitoring with this monitor off. Recorded takes are moved back into time either way.
Tips
- Use headphones and disable your interface’s own direct monitoring, or you will hear the input twice with a slight delay between them.
- Starting or stopping the transport rebuilds the audio graph. Monitoring comes back by itself, but a long reverb tail can reset across that moment.
- Capture is mono. A stereo interface’s left or right input is chosen on the interface, not here.