ITB signal routing

[photowriters]

There’s gotta be a way to route a signal internally without regard to any playback engine or physical piece of hardware, but I cannot figure out how to do it.

I am enrolled in the third semester of a Recording sequence at the local state university, and I am grinding away learning the ins and outs of ProTools. At school in the studio, we have a Mac with PT10 paired up with a 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality SE V3.

At home I have PT10.3.9 and 11.2.1 installed on an HP Z600 workstation. The Z600 has two Xeon E5520 processors, 24GB of RAM, and roughly 6TB of storage. The installed sound card has one stereo input, four stereo outputs, and an ASIO interface. I have an ITB (In The Box) editing assignment that I can do at the studio, but since it is an ITB project, I would rather do it at home.

The audio files consist of 28 four minute tracks of instruments and voice. Additionally the instruments and vocal are arranged into five groups. I have no problem getting the sound out, balancing the instruments across the sound stage, or inserting various equalization and effect plugins to the tracks that require it.

What I cannot seem to accomplish at home is to route the audio from a track to a group master fader, or the output of the master faders to a mix bus. It’s almost child’s play in the studio, and pure hell at home. If I set the output of each track to the default output of the sound card, I can hear it all and all of the faders and inserts function perfectly, but I am unable to route the audio either by selecting an output or send to a group master fader. There’s got to be a way to do that without any regard to any hardware, including the computer sound card, until the mix bus output is sent to the computer sound card and out to the speakers.

Let me thank some knowledgeable and kind soul for showing me the path to ProTools righteousness and knowledge.

Bob

[Darryl Ramm]

Where did you try to look for help?

Open up the Pro Tools Reference Guide (PDFs are on Avid's web site and included with your software) and read about sends and buses, or even better start by reading the whole chapter titled "Basic Mixing".

It is as easy or easier than a physical console once you get the basics, and sometimes the only issue is just the specific terminology, so starting with the Pro Tools documentation (which is pretty well written) can really help. If you have questions after looking at that comeback and ask them here.

[photowriters]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Where did you try to look for help?

In every single PDF file I could download from the Avid.com web site. I'd be more than happy to download the Pro Tools Reference Guide for Pro Tools 11 and research the problem if I could download the PDF file. Unfortunately neither Internet Explorer or Firefox would download the reference guide for Pro Tools 10 or 11.

Open up the Pro Tools Reference Guide (PDFs are on Avid's web site and included with your software) and read about sends and buses, or even better start by reading the whole chapter titled "Basic Mixing".

It is as easy or easier than a physical console once you get the basics, and sometimes the only issue is just the specific terminology, so starting with the Pro Tools documentation (which is pretty well written) can really help. If you have questions after looking at that comeback and ask them here.

Purely FWIW, I am not your typical, trying to become an adult college student. I am more than 50 years past the age of consent, retired from almost 40 years in the aviation transportation industry, and have considerable experience with computers and the Internet.

I have exhausted all of the references at hand and downloadable online. After having spent almost a solid week trying to figure out how to do this, I resorted to this forum as a last resort.

I am going to make one last attempt to download every PT11 PDF file using an FTP protocol. Trust me, if the FTP attempt fails I will be back in spades.

In the meantime . . .

[Darryl Ramm]

All docs for PT 11 are here... http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/u...-Documentation

Make sure you are *not* using the Avid download manager, just directly download the individual reference guide (don't try to download the huge zip bundle). I just downloaded it with no problem. Many download problems are caused by client software or firewalls, but it seems Avid has been having some issues recently.

And none of the files I point at are severed via FTP, so I'm not sure what FTP site you are using.

The set of Pro Tools docs should also be in the Documentation folder within your top level Pro Tools software folder.

[photowriters]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

All docs for PT 11 are here... http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/u...-Documentation

Make sure you are *not* using the Avid download manager, just directly download the individual reference guide (don't try to download the huge zip bundle).

I was getting an error from Adobe Reader during the download. I finally was successful downloading the big zipped bundle.

FWIW, I have yet to learn anything thing new from my reading that addresses my original post. In utter frustration, I hauled my 35 lbs. desktop computer into one of my instructor's offices and he had the same problem. Almost verbatim, he said, "Well, that's Pro Tools. Things that should transfer from one computer to another such as aux bus connections for an ITB mix often don't. Pro Tools is always one giant work around."

The "ultimate" solution was to delete all of the aux buses and delete all of the inputs and all the outputs and recreate the aux buses and outputs as required. That solved all issues except for one.

For some reason, aux bus to aux track works fine, but aux bus to connect to audio track does not. I still have one aux bus that should hook up multiple aux track outputs to a audio track used to record the mix, but it does not work. The setup for the bus is identical to other aux bus connections. I'd still like an answer to that one.

[Darryl Ramm]

Well I suggested you download the individual Pro Tools 11 Reference Guide file not the large bundle. And when I said download I really meant download, not try to view it with Adobe Reader. As in right click (or whatever) on the file link and and do a save as... to your local drive. Then open that with Adobe Reader.

I have no idea why you are having problems, or why your instructor could not help you solve this last one.

What you are asking about does not sound any more than basic stuff with working with aux sends and buses. e.g no more complicated than this intro video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxqEx9QTTo or this http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home...ux-tracks.html

You might be tripping up on bus IO mapping to outputs vs. pure internal buses?, look at Setup>IO>Bus and understand what is going on there. Again the place to start is the reference guide, or look on YouTube for videos. If in doubt, default the busses with the default button. Or maybe mixing up mono and stereo buses? We can't really guess what you are doing wrong.

Nobody can help you with questions that are basically versions of "something does not work for me, tell me why". Folks here need detailed descriptions of what you are doing, screen shots (if legible) would help, and then you might have a chance of getting detailed specific help from other users.

[BobbyDazzler]

Is the Uni version HD, and your home version nonHD?
I can't remember off hand but there may be different features in regards to input monitoring.

[zoff]

Originally Posted by photowriters

There’s gotta be a way to route a signal internally without regard to any playback engine or physical piece of hardware, but I cannot figure out how to do it. ....If I set the output of each track to the default output of the sound card, I can hear it all and all of the faders and inserts function perfectly, but I am unable to route the audio either by selecting an output or send to a group master fader. There’s got to be a way to do that without any regard to any hardware, including the computer sound card, until the mix bus output is sent to the computer sound card and out to the speakers.

Let me thank some knowledgeable and kind soul for showing me the path to ProTools righteousness and knowledge.

Bob

I think your problem is that you are using Master faders to group channels. You should use Aux tracks as "subgroups" instead, and then route the Aux channels to one Master fader that is routed to your physical outputs.

[photowriters]

Originally Posted by BobbyDazzler

Is the Uni version HD, and your home version nonHD?
I can't remember off hand but there may be different features in regards to input monitoring.

Yes. The Solid State Logic Duality SE V3 is paired with PT 10 HD. Mine at home is not HD.

[photowriters]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Well I suggested you download the individual Pro Tools 11 Reference Guide file not the large bundle. And when I said download I really meant download, not try to view it with Adobe Reader. As in right click (or whatever) on the file link and and do a save as... to your local drive. Then open that with Adobe Reader.

Darryl,

Yes, I understood that. For some reason that I have not uncovered, both MS Internet Explorer and Firefox bring up the Adobe Reader browser plug-in when downloading a PDF file despite the fact that the plug-in is disabled in both browsers. It was the plug-in that was halting the download with an error message.

I have no idea why you are having problems, or why your instructor could not help you solve this last one.

What you are asking about does not sound any more than basic stuff with working with aux sends and buses. e.g no more complicated than this intro video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxqEx9QTTo or this http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home...ux-tracks.html

Exactly right. It's basic stuff. FWIW the instructor is a professional recording engineer with years of experience with Pro Tools.

You might be tripping up on bus IO mapping to outputs vs. pure internal buses?

Possible, but I don't think so. Each mono internal track is routed to a group fader via an internal aux stereo bus. Those connections work correctly

Look at Setup>IO>Bus and understand what is going on there.

I'm fairly confident that I have a good working knowledge of what is going on there.

Again the place to start is the reference guide, or look on YouTube for videos. If in doubt, default the busses with the default button. Or maybe mixing up mono and stereo buses? We can't really guess what you are doing wrong.

Part of the process of recreating the setup was to delete and default all of the busses.

There are no mono busses in the setup. The only things that are mono are the individual recorded tracks/clips.

Nobody can help you with questions that are basically versions of "something does not work for me, tell me why". Folks here need detailed descriptions of what you are doing, screen shots (if legible) would help, and then you might have a chance of getting detailed specific help from other users.

Excellent point!

As soon as I get a chance, I will upload screen shots of the I/O setup as well as the relevant section of the mix window. I can mix the project in its current state, which is all the assignment requires, but I do want to learn how to fix the one connection issue.