to i/o or not. That is the question!

[Terry Wetzel]

Good morning. I am currently using the Focusrite 2i4 with PT's 9.0.6 on Win 7, 32 bit. Previously, when I moved up to PT's 9, I successfully recorded using no interface at all via my Mackie 24/8 mixer. That was a while ago and, with my memory, I am lost as to how I accomplished this. I remember that I used only one channel on the Mackie board, utilizing the channel preamp and the aux 1 send. (I record one track at a time into PT's. The procedure worked fine at the time and I recorded several songs before purchasing the 2i4 which lately seems to have developed problems. Can anyone help restore my recollection as to how I might accomplish this recording method? Thanks in advance.

[albee1952]

Since the Mackie has no digital connection(USB, FW, etc) I can only imagine that you fed the analog ouput into the computer's own sound card with some ASIO driver(ASIO4ALL?). While that CAN work, its hardly ideal(most computer sound cards are crap). With the Focusrite, you could simply feed the Mackie outputs(stereo) into the LINE inputs of the Focusrite What's the ultimate goal here?

[Terry Wetzel]

albee. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the 2i4 or, for that matter any interface. The 2i4 has great sounding preamps but I bought it because of the ad pitch of no recording delay' I've since learned that delay can be eliminated by monitoring the signal pre instead of post record. (I hope that's stated correctly). In addition the Mackie method offers in line eq which in pro tools must be done via inserts or sends with plugins. When Pro Tools 9 was first released they advertised it's compatibility with any I/O or no I/O at all! and that worked for me. But, I don't recall how I accomplished that.

[Terry Wetzel]

albee. I had a brain freeze on this but while searching the forums the smoke cleared and now I remember how I did it, (I think)! At the time I was using the now obsolete Audiophile 2496 which, if memory serves and it usually doesn't, operated via an installed pc card. Could that have been the solution I'm searching for? I still have the card but I removed it from the pc. Thanks.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by Terry Wetzel

albee. I had a brain freeze on this but while searching the forums the smoke cleared and now I remember how I did it, (I think)! At the time I was using the now obsolete Audiophile 2496 which, if memory serves and it usually doesn't, operated via an installed pc card. Could that have been the solution I'm searching for? I still have the card but I removed it from the pc. Thanks.

I do believe that card is your solution