M-Audio SOLO (input/record) and Creative 5.1 (output/monitor)

[kamiahmed]

Guys tnx for peeping in.

Iam planning to buy the M-Audio SOLO firewire unit to record my guitars and vocals.

Currently i have the creative 5.1 sound card with the 5.1 speakers(+sub woofer) set which i use as monitors cos ive got used to the speakers frequency and sub woofer sound to get proper mixes done.

Will i be able to use the m-audio (for sound capturing) and creative (for output 5.1 sound) together ??? OR will i have to use M-Audio for both. Will using two hardware for in put and output create any conflicts/errors in nuendo or pro-tools.

I really wanna keep my 5.1 setup on the same PC :(
Pls suggest !




Sorry if something similar has been posted before...iam new here...just registered :)

[AndyH]

Two different soundcards on one PC usually work without any difficulty. There is a big difference between using the cards independently and using them together, however. They each have their own clocks and thus will not be in sync with each other.

Some cards can be synched to an external clock or all run off one card's clock (with the proper digital inter-connections) but I don't believe any Soundblaster variant has this ability. Also, most Creative cards resample everything to 48kHz on board the card. Therefore, if you attempt to record additional tracks on one soundcard while monitoring existing tracks on the other, the new tracks will not be in sync with the old.

[AndyH]

dude....ur the only one who replied...thanks a TONNN. One of my buddies gave me the same answer regarding some clocking error. I guess I will use M-Audio for recording and playback when I do sessions....for other windows multimedia applications I can use creative.

I bought the solo unit yesterday...installed and hooked it up ! With nuendo/adobe audition it only records one channel on a stereo track...when i open a new channel as MONO it doesnt record anything....no signal !

I was able to record stereo before with creative. How can i get a stereo track or atleast a full signal MONO track ! Another thing is that my GUITAR RIG 2 is not taking the guitar signal also even after setting it up properly. Have u faced a common issue ! Is there a setting in nuendo i can change ??

I'l appreciate your reply man ! Thanks so much !

DO U THINK THERE IS A NEW DRIVER OUT FOR THIS THING WITH FIXES ? lemme know pls !

I started to answer your private message but I decided to put everything into the forum instead. What I wrote below may be helpful to you but other people who are more familiar with your equipment may know something more convenient. No one would ever have a chance to contribute if it isn't in the forum post.

There are a number of issues here. WHAT are you trying to record that only produces one track? If it is a microphone, one track is correct. Some gaming type cards will duplicate the input to both tracks but NO professional soundcards behaves this way.

Mono is the correct way to record one microphone. When you select mono in the software, only one channel of the stereo input is active. If you get nothing, you need to plug the mic into the other side (i.e switch the microphone from right channel to left channel).

If your source actually is stereo, something is wrong. Try switching the inputs left to right, right to left, and see if the recording switches to the other track. If so, there is some hardware problem prior to the soundcard.

Hold on. I looked up the soundcard on the M-Audio site. Their web page is a bit confusing, claiming more total I/O than they seem to list. There is one microphone input, one instrument input, and two line inputs. My guess, from the web page, is that you can either use the line inputs or the microphone/instrument inputs, but not both at the same time. If true, this could present a problem in some recording programs, as follows.

The recording program sees two channels. Those two are either the two line inputs or the other two -- the microphone on one channel, the instrument input on the other -- depending upon which you have selected at the hardware level with the switch on the soundcard.

Now suppose you have selected the line inputs. What I wrote above holds for mono recordings: if you tell the recording program to record mono, it will receive signal from just one of the two inputs. If nothing is being recorded, you have connected to the wrong channel.

Now suppose you change the soundcard switch to microphone/instrument. As far as the recording program is concerned, nothing has changed. Tell it to record in stereo and it will make two channels. If either of those two inputs is not being used, either microphone or instrument, nothing will appear on that channel in your recording.

However, now there is a big problem if you want to record mono. Only one of those two input will be received by the recording program. But, microphone input and instrument input are not interchangeable. Therefore you can record from one of those two inputs in mono whenever you want but you can never record from the other.

Some programs will let you select either channel independently. Possibly Audition will do so in multi-track mode. Maybe this depends upon the soundcard driver. I have never dealt with that exact situation, where one channel is one kind of device input and the other a different kind. I have only multiple pairs, such as a pair of microphone inputs. If I want to record only one microphone, I must plug it into the channel that is active in the recording program for mono, as above.

If you are stuck with only being able to select the two inputs as a pair, there is a fairly easy workaround. Record in stereo. One channel will be blank. In edit view, select the channel that has your audio. The entire channel must be hightlighted, from beginning to end. Now do a Save Selection, using a unique file name, so that the selected channel is saved as a new mono file. Use that in your mixes and discard the original, or save it for backup-only.

If instead you want to waste storage space and processing time by having two identical channels of mono, instead of saving the selected channel, copy it,then paste it into the blank channel. - this is not the recommended professional approach unless this single recording is all that you want to write to an audio CD.

Unfortunately I can't tell you anything about Nuendo, I have never used it. I am also unfamiliar with your soundcard, I was only writing from basic principles.

This also applies to Guitar Rig 2. What little I know about it is that the hardware part is USB. Using it should not involve your M-Audio card at all, as far as I can tell. Just what are the symptoms of your difficulty? Did you use this successfully before you had the firewire soundcard?