![]() ![]() The main point of this dialogue box is to control the way in which you hear any audio inputs on record-enabled tracks, and pre-existing soundbites in those tracks, during playback and recording. The simpler dialogue is the one that appears if you're using the Mac's built-in hardware. The Input Monitoring Mode dialogue with four options is the one you see if you're using a separate audio interface. Vying for the award of 'most confusing feature in Digital Performer ' is the Input Monitoring Mode dialogue box, which offers various options that control some of the finer points of input-monitoring behaviour. Keyboard players and guitarists frequently seem oblivious to to the delay associated with a 512-sample Buffer Size, whereas singers and drummers may well still not be happy with the few milliseconds latency of a 128-sample setting.īest practice here would seem to be to use 'Direct hardware playthrough' when latency is unacceptable and 'Monitor record-enabled tracks through effects', coupled with the lowest Buffer Size you can get away with (remembering that low sizes lead to much greater processor usage), when you need to use DP 's effects processing on your monitor signal. How serious this is depends firstly on the Buffer Size itself, and secondly on what you're recording. This allows the possibility of adding MAS effects (such as reverb) in real time to the monitor signal, but also imposes a delay commensurate with the Buffer Size set in the Configure Hardware Driver dialogue box. Select 'Monitor record-enabled tracks through effects', on the other hand, and the round trip from track input to output now not only goes via your Mac, but passes through the MOTU Audio System itself. If you select 'Direct hardware playthrough', DP will work Audio Patch Thru so that record-enabled track inputs are routed to outputs via the shortest possible route - often a brief round-trip from your audio interface, into the Mac and then straight back to your interface - with the result that monitoring is subject to little or no latency, and the musician hears what he or she is performing instantaneously. To begin with, we'll just consider the top two options: 'Direct hardware playthrough' and 'Monitor record-enabled tracks through effects'.Īs with so many things in the computer-based studio, the shadow of latency looms over one of these two choices. Go Setup menu / Configure Audio System / Input Monitoring Mode and you get a dialogue box that controls how Audio Patch Thru behaves. Audio Patch Thru is, then, a very straightforward system for letting DP handle your monitoring, but it can be configured in various ways to allow for different monitoring requirements. Turn off Audio Patch Thru, or take off record-enable status, and you'll no longer be able to hear your input. So if, say, you have a mic patched into a mono audio track in DP and the track's output is set to use the stereo output that drives your studio speakers or headphones, you'll hear the mic signal as long as the track is record-enabled and Audio Patch Thru is turned on. When this is turned on, by engaging the little 'headphones' button in the Audio Monitor window (or, in DP 4.6, in the Consolidated Window's title bar) DP routes the inputs of any record-enabled tracks to their outputs. With Digital Performer running under the MOTU Audio System (its 'native' audio mode), monitoring behaviour is controlled by the Audio Patch Thru feature. No matter how simple or complex your setup, establishing a flexible and reliable approach to monitoring during recording is absolutely crucial.Ĭlicking the 'headphones' icon, shown here nestling amongst the other buttons in the Consolidated Window's title bar, turns Audio Patch Thru on and off. The latest versions of DP have plenty of facilities for integrating with such hardware, and this month we look in depth at some of the most important of these. While computer-based audio and music production is becoming increasingly 'virtual' in nature, there can't be many DP users who don't have some hardware, whether mixers, synths or effects units. This month we take a look at using DP with such hardware. The Masterverb plug-in is being used in this instance to give the vocalist some reverb in the headphones, but the effect will not be recorded.įew of us use our software sequencers in isolation - we all need associated hardware, such as monitors, external effects, and favourite MIDI synths. In the screen above, a monitor mix is being sent to musicians via the mixer's aux send section. ![]() In Digital Performer, flexible monitor mixes can be achieved in various ways. Good monitoring during recording is essential. ![]()
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