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01/23/2007
Using Multiple Audio Interfaces
The M-Audio Delta 1010 audio cards have always been one of our favorites. Besides being compatible with nearly all the audio applications available, M-audio has a very cool ASIO driver. The especially nice feature about their driver is that you can use multiple 1010 cards and they will appear as one card with all the available I/O. I took this for granted until recently as I've been working with the FireWire and USB interfaces.
My ideal setup on our test machine is to use two M-Audio FireWire 1814s and two Black Box USB interfaces for guitar and vocals. Once inside of Protools M-Powered I discovered that you can only choose one interface at a time. We verified with DigiDesign that you cannot use multiple interfaces simultaneously. Major bummer.
My favorite application for audio recording Ableton Live, which comes with all the M-Audio cards that I can think of (usually the Lite version though). I learned that it also only permits you to choose one sound card.
So after a week of trying to get it to work I finally found a really cool application for using multiple sound cards. It's called ASIO4ALL and is available for free at www.asio4all.com. This unique application appears to the system as a type of virtual ASIO sound card and internally maps all the I/O from any other sound cards connected to the machine. Inside of ASIO4ALL I can see all my audio interfaces and enable whichever I/O I need. For example, I only need one set of outputs, but I need 10 inputs. So, inside of ASIO4ALL I can disable all but the two appropriate outputs and I can enable the appropriate inputs.
Well, the good news is that when I go inside of Live I can now choose the ASIO4ALL sound driver as the audio hardware. And inside the I/O setup I now have access to all my inputs, spanning the black box and FireWire 1814. So far, so good.
Inside of Protools M-Powered I can't access any non M-Audio devices, so unfortunately I can't choose the ASIO4ALL with all the inputs.
Brent here says I should just use Cakewalk because it will work with multiple interfaces without any workarounds. We'll see. In the meantime give ASIO4ALL a shot if you are in the same situation.
Ashley Guy
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