Setting Up Live Input/Effects Monitoring
(Hearing Your Effects In Realtime While You Play)
Press F3 again to open your mixer and along the left-hand side where it says "Audio Input 1" click on the box that says Waver and change it to "Kristal Line In". This is how you activate the live input/effects monitoring. There should be a little mini mixer that pops up when you select Line In, on the first input select the intput from your soundcard that you are using. You will probably want to choose the left channel from your soundcard if you're using a stock soundcard (or if you're using a multiple input card, select the input you are plugged into).
NOTE: This little mixer can also be used to adjust the "input" signal that being sent to the Boogex plugin (just like setting the input volume in your soundcard's mixer window).
So now you should be able to strum your guitar and see the input meters going in Kristal Audio and you should also be able to hear it through your speakers. If so, then you are now set to start loading effects and using them while you play.
Some things you will notice, is that there are only two effects inserts on each track, so you can only load two effects at a time on each track. However, you can also add 3 effects on the master channel in addition to the 2 on the tracks. So that gives you a total of 5 effects that you can have going at the same time while you are playing. Unfortunately, Kristal cannot use the same input on mulitple tracks for parallel processing (using two or more instances of Boogex on different tracks and panning them to get a wider stereo guitar sound) like you can in Samplitude. I haven't tried this with some of the other freebies, so if anyone uses one that can do this let me know and I'll include it in this lesson.
Another thing (and this is a big one),
Kristal cannot record while monitoring effects plugins. Kristal can only record dry, so you won't be able to hear any effects while recording. This is a draw back for Kristal, but hey.... It's a free program.
I highly recommend checking out
Reaper. It can record while monitoring effects, do the parallel processing (mentioned above), plus a whole lot more. It's only $40 (for a non commercial license) and it is well worth the price.
See my lesson on setting up Reaper
HERE. (<-- NO LINK YET... IN PROGRESS)
Ok, that should be everything.... But if anyone is still having problems then I'll try to help get it up and running.