DAW for Using Multiple USB Interfaces?

[naftulikay]

I have mostly built my studio but I have run into an issue that I hadn't planned for.

Original Setup

To begin, here's is my current setup which was as planned:



I have a Shure microphone as an input on the front of the device, and I have two 1/4" inputs being used on the back to capture output from my guitar modeler, a Boss GT-1000. When I'm not recording, I use this to practice by enabling monitoring on the inputs so I can hear the guitar output through my headphones or studio monitors.

Enter Guitar Re-Amping

What I hadn't planned for was the ability to use the GT-1000 to re-amp dry signal on the fly. The GT-1000 USB audio interface exposes three outputs (main, sub, dry) and three inputs (main, sub, dry):




Ignore the sub input/output, as that's not really interesting here.

It has been a long time since I did any home studio work, certainly over a decade, and I had never thought of re-amping as something that was even an option, but basically what you can do is:

1. Record both the main outputs from the GT-1000 and the dry output.
2. To re-amp, send your dry output track to the GT-1000's dry input.
3. You can now use the exact same dry signal and change settings on the GT-1000 to completely redesign the sound if desired.

This is amazing and I never thought of this as a possibility. My immediate goals are now to a) record a bunch of dry inputs for certain melodies/riffs and b) replay them on a loop through the GT-1000 while monitoring in order to c) sculpt the exact sound that I'd like for each part.

Now, with this setup, my studio setup will have to look like this:



Choosing a DAW

Back in the day, I was using SONAR's Cakewalk and a firewire interface. I have a free Ableton Live Lite license and I have downloaded Bandlab's Cakewalk resurrection. When crawling through settings, it seems like both of these assume that you'll only ever be using a single USB interface.

Here are my goals:

1. Use as few cables as possible.
   • If I'm able to realize the setup above, I'll only need a single USB cable to the GT-1000.
   • If I'm not able to just use USB, then I'll have to buy a D/I splitter, route the D/I into the Scarlett, and route analog sends/returns to/from the GT-1000 and Scarlett, significantly increasing the amount of cables I'll have to be using; I was originally only planning to have two 1/4" outputs from the GT-1000 to the Scarlett.
   • For monitoring, if I still need to use analog outputs from the GT-1000, this is fine.
2. Be able to record mono dry output from the GT-1000 alongside the wet/main stereo outputs.
3. Computer audio should still route output through the Focusrite 18i8.

Is there a DAW that is better suited to these use-cases than the ones I have been playing around with? Alternatively, am I simply missing something in the settings to make this possible?

 

[TalismanRich]

I have never seen any DAW that can use two interfaces for audio at the same time. I think this is fundamental to the way ASIO works with Windows. It's not the DAW, but Windows that has to support more than one interface, and there is no option for that in Windows audio settings.

 

[naftulikay]

I have never seen any DAW that can use two interfaces for audio at the same time. I think this is fundamental to the way ASIO works with Windows. It's not the DAW, but Windows that has to support more than one interface, and there is no option for that in Windows audio settings.

I see that ASIO4ALL, which is seems to be an in/out aggregate driver for Windows, at least purports to do this. I have been playing around with it and somehow I got outputs to work once but can't reproduce any working configuration. I also run Linux for work so I will probably be playing around with jack, which can probably do this. I think the GT-1000 outputs at 48kHz @32bits and the Focusrite by default is 44.1kHz @24 bits and I can't seem to change the kHz that ASIO4ALL expects.

This is what the UI looks like:

 

[naftulikay]

I was able to get it to work!

1. I have the GT-1000 buffer size at 512, default settings for everything else, no hardware buffer. I know this is probably too big of a buffer but I'll play around with it.
2. I have enabled the GT-1000/MAIN/In: 2x 48kHz 24bits as an input, can probably enable the dry input as well, no outputs enabled because I don't need to send yet.
3. I have the Focusrite buffer size at 96, default settings for everything else except for enabling the hardware buffer.
4. I have enabled the Focusrite outputs but not the inputs.
5. I'm using Ableton Live Lite and using ASIO4ALL as the audio device.
6. I'm not hearing any glitches so the settings are at least somewhat safe, though I was using a looper on the pedal so IDK about actual playback latency.

There are still a few things to figure out:

• I need to test that I can record both the dry input and main inputs at the same time from the GT-1000, this is most likely possible of course.
• I need to test being able to send dry signal to the GT-1000 to test the re-amping loop, this will mean I need to enable the dry output to the GT-1000.
• Since the GT-1000 does 48kHz in/out by default, I'd like to see if I can get the Focusrite to do the same. When I've fiddled with things so far, they seem to break everything, but I'll try more things.

All of this was more or less slightly-informed shots in the dark. I know what buffer size means and I've done digital and analog audio before, so I do have some knowledge, but it was very much trial and error to get this working.

I'm providing screenshots to demonstrate my settings so that I can find them in the future and in hope that someone else benefits.

ASIO4ALL Settings

GT-1000 Settings:


Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 Settings:


Ableton Live Lite Settings

Preferences:


Track Setup:


Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 Settings

 

[naftulikay]

For what it's worth, I came up with an alternate solution which uses the GT-1000 as an analog loop, and does not require straddling multiple USB devices for recording/playback. In this case, the Focusrite is used as the only USB audio device:



To practice or record, connect an instrument to front input 2 on the Focusrite, this should be captured by the DAW and should use hardware monitoring to simultaneously send this to output 3 on the back of the Focusrite. This will go to the instrument input plug on the GT-1000. When recording, be sure to record input 2 as the dry signal and inputs 5/6 as the wet signal from the GT-1000.

To re-amp, send the dry recording track to the GT-1000 on output 3 and record inputs 5/6 from the GT-1000 to re-record the wet output. Set it up on a loop and you can live re-amp.

With this setup, latency will only be that of the Focusrite. I was able to try this out last night, but I can't remember whether I was doing the input 2 to output 3 passthrough in hardware or in software. If you're able to do so in hardware, then you will only have single trip latency in recording inputs 3, 5, and 6, you won't have to send/return. When re-amping, you will incur roundtrip latency as you are sending the dry signal from your DAW over USB to the Focusrite and to the GT-1K, and then receive the wet signal over USB from the GT-1000 via inputs 5/6 on the Focusrite.

 

[rob aylestone]

I've never had reliable consistent performance from asio4all - but it's interesting to see you've made it work. With my system, if my firepod drops out which it does occasionally, it defaults to an old asio4all setting, which works, but sometimes I don't spot it until I spot the red LED on the rack unit, other times, the latency is what makes me look for the red light. The settings appear to change randomly?

 

[naftulikay]

I've never had reliable consistent performance from asio4all - but it's interesting to see you've made it work. With my system, if my firepod drops out which it does occasionally, it defaults to an old asio4all setting, which works, but sometimes I don't spot it until I spot the red LED on the rack unit, other times, the latency is what makes me look for the red light. The settings appear to change randomly?

Yes, I had to really hack on the buffer size settings for both the GT-1000 and the Focusrite to keep delay down to a place where I can monitor live playing with acceptable latency. I did see clocks drift markedly, but admittedly my hardware here, a laptop, won't be able to sustain clock speeds high enough to keep that to a minimum.

I also might be doing some things in Linux using Jack (version 2), which doesn't on its own support multiple USB devices, but there are hacks using the alsa_in and alsa_out system, and there are other ways of doing this as well, but I haven't tried it out so I can't say how well it works.

My last recording interface was actually a Firepod as well over Firewire from a million years ago. It's cool that in 2022 that Firewire is no longer necessary, but it's extremely strange to me that there's still no effective clock synchronization method over just USB. I suppose it would be possible using optical from a PCIe soundcard. As an engineer, I understand why this is the case, but it's still frustrating.

 

[RadicalDelusion]

I have mostly built my studio but I have run into an issue that I hadn't planned for.

Original Setup

To begin, here's is my current setup which was as planned:

View attachment 120453

I have a Shure microphone as an input on the front of the device, and I have two 1/4" inputs being used on the back to capture output from my guitar modeler, a Boss GT-1000. When I'm not recording, I use this to practice by enabling monitoring on the inputs so I can hear the guitar output through my headphones or studio monitors.

Enter Guitar Re-Amping

What I hadn't planned for was the ability to use the GT-1000 to re-amp dry signal on the fly. The GT-1000 USB audio interface exposes three outputs (main, sub, dry) and three inputs (main, sub, dry):


View attachment 120456

Ignore the sub input/output, as that's not really interesting here.

It has been a long time since I did any home studio work, certainly over a decade, and I had never thought of re-amping as something that was even an option, but basically what you can do is:

1. Record both the main outputs from the GT-1000 and the dry output.
2. To re-amp, send your dry output track to the GT-1000's dry input.
3. You can now use the exact same dry signal and change settings on the GT-1000 to completely redesign the sound if desired.

This is amazing and I never thought of this as a possibility. My immediate goals are now to a) record a bunch of dry inputs for certain melodies/riffs and b) replay them on a loop through the GT-1000 while monitoring in order to c) sculpt the exact sound that I'd like for each part.

Now, with this setup, my studio setup will have to look like this:

View attachment 120459

Choosing a DAW

Back in the day, I was using SONAR's Cakewalk and a firewire interface. I have a free Ableton Live Lite license and I have downloaded Bandlab's Cakewalk resurrection. When crawling through settings, it seems like both of these assume that you'll only ever be using a single USB interface.

Here are my goals:

1. Use as few cables as possible.
   • If I'm able to realize the setup above, I'll only need a single USB cable to the GT-1000.
   • If I'm not able to just use USB, then I'll have to buy a D/I splitter, route the D/I into the Scarlett, and route analog sends/returns to/from the GT-1000 and Scarlett, significantly increasing the amount of cables I'll have to be using; I was originally only planning to have two 1/4" outputs from the GT-1000 to the Scarlett.
   • For monitoring, if I still need to use analog outputs from the GT-1000, this is fine.
2. Be able to record mono dry output from the GT-1000 alongside the wet/main stereo outputs.
3. Computer audio should still route output through the Focusrite 18i8.

Is there a DAW that is better suited to these use-cases than the ones I have been playing around with? Alternatively, am I simply missing something in the settings to make this possible?

I know that using avid ProTools in Mac OS allows you to do this. Assuming you have enough ports and power to each device. It'll create an aggregate device. You set it up in the system audio/MIDI preferences. I don't think it's possible on windows and I don't know about any other DAW's.