The compact mixing desk thread

[dave_bass5]

We use Macs for our daily drivers at work. We find the older Office 2021 stuff runs perfectly on our M2’s, although e hate having to use those apps. 

im probably going to get an M4  MacBook Air this week. It will involve me trading in my M1 MacBook Pro, but i want more ram as 16GB is not quite enough for what i need to run Gig Performer comfortably at gigs with everything loaded. 
 

I have also recently got the new iPad 11 base model, and that seems to record fine from my XR18 in to Cubasis, although so far only used it for rehearsals. 

[Woodinblack]

I have an old original macbook air - like an original 2008 intel macbook air, and I use garageband to record from the mixer. Its not worth anything so no risk using it live and it works fine.

[51m0n]

Run an x32 for recording onto windows no problem. Have had great success with the xr18 too.

 

X32 with the x-live card is mental though, 48KHz 32 bit floating point to the sd cards, and usb at the same time (albeit at 24 bit). 

 

So far it's been spot on.

 

My windows laptop is a bit of a beast though, ROG Zephyrus with 32 GB of RAM.

 

I use Macs for work too btw

Edited Monday at 18:41 by 51m0n

[Al Krow]

Good to hear from you @51m0n! I've missed your erudition on all things compressor related! Hope life is treating you well, and the music is still being made with your band?

 

@dave_bass5 - mate, re. your question, I think I may briefly have had an iPad many years back, long before I (finally!) got stuck into a DAW at the start of this year, but all my set up is non-Apple based, so I'm keen to see if I can make it all work with Windows.

 

Interestingly another mate of mine (an experienced bass player) said he'd had the exact same experience with his digital desk and Windows: ie inputs all fine via ASIO, but no output!

 

Thank goodness for Focusrite (and other trad digital interfaces) for us luddite Windows/PC users, eh?! Literally took just a few hours to get up to speed on how to use it with the help of a couple of online tutorials. I suspect @Sibob will be happy for me to have finally made the plunge 😊

 

Fyi - my gen 3 Focusrite 2i2 gen 3 was just £109 new (including P&P), from Focusrite, which seems like v good value to me?

[Woodinblack]

You certainly can get it to work on windows, its just a bit more work. Is there nothing on the A&H site about it?

[Chienmortbb]

15 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

Good to hear from you @51m0n! I've missed your erudition on all things compressor related! Hope life is treating you well, and the music is still being made with your band?

 

@dave_bass5 - mate, re. your question, I think I may briefly have had an iPad many years back, long before I (finally!) got stuck into a DAW at the start of this year, but all my set up is non-Apple based, so I'm keen to see if I can make it all work with Windows.

 

Interestingly another mate of mine (an experienced bass player) said he'd had the exact same experience with his digital desk and Windows: ie inputs all fine via ASIO, but no output!

 

Thank goodness for Focusrite (and other trad digital interfaces) for us luddite Windows/PC users, eh?! Literally took just a few hours to get up to speed on how to use it with the help of a couple of online tutorials. I suspect @Sibob will be happy for me to have finally made the plunge 😊

 

Fyi - my gen 3 Focusrite 2i2 gen 3 was just £109 new (including P&P), from Focusrite, which seems like v good value to me?

Are you using the asio4all driver?

[Al Krow]

28 minutes ago, Chienmortbb said:

Are you using the asio4all driver?

 

Nope, the bespoke A&H CQ USB driver: Windows ASIOTM/WDM Driver v5.50

 

I've seen a number of comments on the net about the asio4all driver giving rise to identical issues, though.

[Al Krow]

20 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

You certainly can get it to work on windows, its just a bit more work. Is there nothing on the A&H site about it?

 

Have spent a bit more time getting my head around the Focusrite - v. easy bit of kit to get to grips with. But also had a detailed trawl through the A&H user forum and several other bods have also struggled with the no output / DAW issue. Perhaps that pointed me in the right direction or something else triggered the solution, but it's proven to be a ridiculously simple fix in the end!  I'll share it in case of use to anyone else:

 

On the CQ Config screen all the inputs have an "Input Source" selection. This has default set to analogue (for instruments and mics). The easy fix, when using the DAW is to set the playback input (in my case Stereo In 17/18) to USB. Playback is automatically set up that way on the Focusrite, with no choice in the matter. On the desk, likely to need to swap back to "analogue" if you want to get other input sources from the PC through the Stereo In (e.g. from Spotify) which is where my confusion possibly arose. But seems super obvious, now I've figured it out!!

 

And if I set the buffer at 512 instead of 1024 the latency also halves from 10.7 to 5.3ms, which is then comparable to the Focusrite's 4.0ms. Thinking my little love affair with the Focusrite could be short lived - great bit of kit but (fingers crossed) going to be superfluous! They have an excellent 30 day return window for online purchases.

 

Edited Tuesday at 18:15 by Al Krow