Layla and SB Live coexisting

[AlChuck]

Currently I have a lowly Pentium 200 MMX w/64 MB 66Mhz RAM with a Sound Blaster Live! card, and I'm getting ready to do an upgrade. Besides the host itself, I plan to keep the SB Live! as my MIDI synth and sampler (hooray for SoundFonts!), but use something like the Echo Layla or Mona for digital audio recording. As I thought about it, I realized that it's not clear to me how this will all work. If I'm monitoring through the outputs of the Layla, say, how do I hear the SB Live? Does such a setup require an outboard mixer to combine the outputs to a stereo pair for monitoring? Or do you take the output of the SB Live and run it through two of the channels of the Layla, back into the computer? This is starting to sound silly -- do I record the MIDI stuff to digital audio then? -Though of course I'd have to mix that stuff to audio anyway to create a stereo WAV for burning to CD, so maybe that's not silly after all...
Thanks!

 

[studioviols]

Need your wisdom

I'd like to thread on this issue as I also have just built a PC based DAW and am purchasing an Echo Mia.

I use MIDI and also have an SB Live.

I would appreciate talking about your experiences.

 

[alfalfa]

Lots of guys on the sound on sound forum use Mia s with sblives. Try doing a search there.

If you have a spare pair of inputs on your layla then you can connect the outputs of the sblive to the inputs of the layla (use the sblive's rear outputs by enabling 4 speaker mode - they are much higher quality than the fronts). You may have some ground loop hum noise issues but that can be solved.

An external mixer to combine the layla and sblive outputs is another option. However it would be a waste to corrupt the output of the layla by running it through a cheap behringer or mackie.

Whatever you do, dont connect the digital outs of the sblive to the spdif ins of the layla. This would limit you to the 48khz sampling rate of the live. Your sound quality would also suffer as the layla would derive its clock signal from the jittery clock of the sblive.

With regards to recording the midi to audio, isnt there some way you can setup the sblive so you are recording the midi (using the audiohq or windows mixer). The guys at sound on sound will know.

 

[Teacher]

Lots of guys on the sound on sound forum use Mia s with sblives. Try doing a search there.

If you have a spare pair of inputs on your layla then you can connect the outputs of the sblive to the inputs of the layla (use the sblive's rear outputs by enabling 4 speaker mode - they are much higher quality than the fronts). You may have some ground loop hum noise issues but that can be solved.

An external mixer to combine the layla and sblive outputs is another option. However it would be a waste to corrupt the output of the layla by running it through a cheap behringer or mackie.

Whatever you do, dont connect the digital outs of the sblive to the spdif ins of the layla. This would limit you to the 48khz sampling rate of the live. Your sound quality would also suffer as the layla would derive its clock signal from the jittery clock of the sblive.

With regards to recording the midi to audio, isnt there some way you can setup the sblive so you are recording the midi (using the audiohq or windows mixer). The guys at sound on sound will know.

u think a mackie would be a weaker link sound wise then a layla? i would agree if u had say apogee, cranesong, benchmark, mytek etc. converters.... sounds controversial

 

[AlChuck]

Talk about digging up corpses...

Wow, I was amazed to see that post with my name as the thread starter... shit! It's fully three years old!

With regards to alfalfa's comment on recording the midi to audio, it's quite easy, and simply a matter of arming a track with its source set to the SB Live's WAV In, setting the Live's recording properties so that you are recording from its MIDI synth only, turn off the metronome if it's on by default, mute everything except the MIDI track you want to record, and hit record.

Afterwards make sure you mute the MIDI track if you're listening to the audio recording of it, or vice-versa, or they will probably comb filter each other like crazy.