Recording Audio

Silverdaw can record you. Sing, play an instrument, talk, or feed in a line from a mixer, and Silverdaw captures it while the rest of your arrangement plays underneath. What you record becomes an ordinary item in the Library, so everything else in this guide — trimming, slicing, warping, effects — works on it just the same.

Nothing you record touches your project until you decide to keep it. You can record, listen, record again, and close the dialog without changing a thing.

Opening the Record Audio dialog

Choose File ▸ Record Audio…, or click the record button in the transport.

Everything happens in one window, in two stages: you set up and record, then you review what you captured and choose what to do with it.

Setting up

Input

Input is where your sound comes from.

• The first dropdown lists the microphones and audio inputs Silverdaw can see. Pick the one you want to record from. If you plug something in while the dialog is open, click Rescan.
• The second dropdown chooses Mono or Stereo. Use Mono for a single microphone or a single instrument — it is the usual choice. Use Stereo for a stereo source such as a mixer or a keyboard with two outputs.
• Level is a meter showing how loud your input is right now. Make some noise and watch it move. If it never moves at all, see When nothing is recorded.
• Gain makes the incoming signal louder or quieter before it is recorded. Aim for a healthy meter that does not sit at the very top. Double-click the slider to return it to 0 dB.

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If No input available is shown, Silverdaw could not find a microphone or input at all. Connect one and click Rescan.

Timing

Sound takes time to travel out of your speakers, through the air (or a cable), and back into your input. Left uncorrected, everything you play lands slightly late against the backing.

The Timing row shows what Silverdaw is currently allowing for. Until you measure it, it reads Uncalibrated · using driver estimate — a figure your audio hardware reports, which is usually far smaller than the real delay.

Click Calibrate to measure it properly. See Calibrating timing below. Once measured, the row shows the figure in milliseconds, and the button becomes Recalibrate.

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Calibration is remembered for that pairing of output and input device, so you only need to do it once per setup.

Backing

Backing is what you hear while you play.

The list shows the tracks in your project with a checkbox each. Tick the ones you want to hear and untick the rest. All and None select and clear the whole list quickly. A track that is silenced by a mute or a solo elsewhere in the project is marked Muted.

Volume sets how loud the backing sits in your ears. It has no effect on your project — your real mutes, solos, and fader levels are left exactly as they are, and the backing volume is not recorded into the take.

If your project has no tracks yet, you will see There are no tracks to play along to yet. and can record without any backing.

Record Window

Record Window decides where recording starts and stops:

• From Start — begins at the top of the project.
• From Playhead — starts wherever the playhead sits and runs until you stop.
• Over the Selected Range — records only over a timeline range you have selected, and stops automatically at the end of it. This option is only available when a range is selected.

Metronome

• Count Me In plays one bar of clicks before recording begins, so you know where the beat is.
• Click While Recording keeps the click going after the count-in.

Neither the count-in nor the click is recorded into your take.

Monitor

Hear Yourself plays your input back to you alongside the backing, so you can hear what you are singing or playing.

WARNING

Use headphones when Hear Yourself is on. Through speakers, your microphone picks up its own output and howls.

Your own voice arrives in your ears a few milliseconds late — Silverdaw tells you roughly how late. This affects only what you hear live; the recorded take still lands on the beat.

If your input and output run at different sample rates, monitoring is not possible and Silverdaw says so.

Recording

Recording decides what kind of item your take becomes — the same distinction as Music and Simple samples:

• Music takes the project tempo and beat markers, so the take warps and stays in time like any other musical clip. Use this for singing and playing.
• Simple has no tempo at all. Use it for speech, sound effects, and anything that should never be stretched.

Clean Up Background Noise removes low-level background hiss and hum from the take. It is aimed at microphone vocals recorded in an untreated room. Leave it off for line inputs, which are already clean.

Making a take

Click Record (or press R or Space) to start.

If you turned on Count Me In, you get a bar of clicks first, with the bars remaining shown on screen. Then the backing plays and Silverdaw captures your input, drawing a live waveform of your performance as it goes down along with the elapsed time. In Music mode the project's beat grid is drawn over the waveform, lined up with the beats you are actually hearing, so you can see at a glance whether you are landing on the bar. Simple mode has no grid, because speech has no beats to mark.

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A stereo take is drawn as separate left and right lanes when Waveform display is set to Left and right in Preferences ▸ General, both while you record and while you review. The same setting draws it as one combined waveform instead.

Click Stop — or press R or Space again — to finish. With Over the Selected Range chosen, recording stops on its own at the end of the range.

Cancel abandons a take in progress and throws it away, leaving your project exactly as it was.

Silverdaw keeps a moment of audio from just before the point where recording began, so a note played fractionally early is not cut off.

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A single take can run up to 30 minutes. If you reach the limit, recording stops and everything captured up to that point is kept.

Reviewing a take

When recording stops, the dialog switches to review. Nothing has been added to your project yet.

You see the take's waveform, along with its length, whether it is mono or stereo, and its tempo.

• Play (or Space) auditions the take. The button becomes Stop while it is playing. Click the waveform to play from a particular point.
• Play With the Arrangement plays the take against the tracks you recorded over, so you can hear whether it sits right. Backing volume balances the two.
• Name is what the item will be called in the Library. Give it something you will recognise later.
• Save as Stereo turns a mono take into a two-channel item. Both channels hold the same audio, which is useful if you intend to pan or process the sides differently afterwards.
• Split Channels applies to a genuinely stereo take, and separates its left and right channels into two items. This lets you use a two-channel mixer as your input device and have its two sources land apart from each other. With Each as Stereo ticked, each half becomes a two-channel item in its own right.

Below the controls, Silverdaw tells you exactly where the take will land if you add it to the timeline.

Keeping, redoing, or discarding

Four buttons finish the job:

• Add to Library keeps the take as a Library item without placing it. Use this when you want to decide where it goes later.
• Add to Timeline keeps it and places it where you recorded it — on the selected track if that track is empty, otherwise on a new track of its own. A split take places both halves where you played them, each on its own track.
• Record Again throws the take away and returns you to the setup stage with your settings intact, ready for another attempt.
• Discard throws the take away and closes the dialog. Your project is untouched.

Either way of keeping a take adds it to the Library, where it behaves like any other item: open it in the Clip Editor, slice it into loops, run stem separation on it, or drag more copies onto the timeline.

Calibrating timing

Click Calibrate in the Input section to open Calibrate Recording Latency.

Silverdaw plays a short series of clicks through your output device and listens for them arriving back at your input, measuring the true round trip. It then shifts your recordings back by that amount so they sit where you actually played them.

For this to work, the clicks have to physically reach your input:

• With a microphone, turn the volume up a little, point the microphone at your speakers — or hold a headphone earpiece against it — and keep quiet for a few seconds.
• With a line input, mixer, or DI, patch an output back into that input. A cable is the most accurate method of all.

Click Measure. Progress is shown click by click. When it finishes you get a measured round trip in milliseconds; click Use Measurement to apply it.

If the measurement fails, the button becomes Try Again. Stop abandons a measurement in progress, and Clear removes a stored calibration.

Entering a figure by hand

Where measuring acoustically is not practical, type a value into the Or enter it field in milliseconds and click Apply. The Timing row then notes that the figure was entered by hand.

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If a calibration was measured at one sample rate and your project now uses another, Silverdaw flags it as worth measuring again.

Choosing the recording input driver

Windows can offer the same physical input through several different drivers. Silverdaw picks one automatically, which is right for almost everyone.

If your input does not appear in the list at all, or sounds wrong, choose a specific driver under Recording input driver in Preferences ▸ Audio. The input itself is always chosen in the Record Audio dialog, not in Preferences.

Recordings in your project

A recording is stored as a file beside your project, in the same way as a generated stem or sample. Saving a project keeps recordings with it, so the whole project folder can be moved or synced to another machine and still open. See Projects.

Two other things follow from this:

• File ▸ Import from Project… offers another project's recordings alongside its stems and samples, so you can pull a take you like into a new project. See Importing from another project.
• With Clean up project files on in Preferences ▸ Project, removing a recording from the Library also deletes its file from disk. This cannot be undone.

When nothing is recorded

If the Level meter never moves, or a take comes back silent, Windows is probably blocking access to your microphone.

Silverdaw records through a background audio engine that has no window of its own, so Windows can refuse access without ever showing you a prompt. A blocked input opens quite normally and simply returns silence.

Open Settings ▸ Privacy & security ▸ Microphone and check all three of:

1. Microphone access is on.
2. Let apps access your microphone is on.
3. Silverdaw is on in the list of apps below.

Then reopen the Record Audio dialog.

Other messages you may see:

• This input is delivering silence. Windows is very likely blocking microphone access — check the three settings above.
• That input could not be opened. Another application is using the device exclusively. Close it, or choose a different input.
• The input was disconnected. Reconnect it, or pick another input.
• Playback could not start, so the take was not begun. Try again, or check your audio output device.
• Your computer could not keep up. Some audio was lost. Close other applications before recording again.
• There is not enough free disk space to record. Free some space and try again.
• The recording could not be written to disk. Check that your project folder can be written to, then try again.

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Start or stop recording	R or Space
Play or stop the take while reviewing it	Space
Close the dialog	Esc

These work anywhere in the Record Audio dialog. Space is ignored while you are typing in the Name field, and R is also ignored while a dropdown has focus, so you can pick a device or a channel count without starting a take by accident.