Using more than 32 ins in the apollo with PT software

[TNM]

Hi, i thought this might be useful to other Apollo users who are worried about the 32 i/o limit with third party non avid interfaces.

What you will never be able to do is use more than 32 outputs at a time, so that's a done deal, and you won't be able to *record* more than 32 ins simultaneously, but you can record up to 64 ins in rotation which is actually very useful. You can also use 64 ins in apollo in realtime regardless of pro tools. This is the important bit.

So, my friend brought over his two apollos to put together with my 2 so we could test this and all was golden.

Basically, i have 26 apollo analog inputs here with my 2 adats/apollo 8 and apollo twin.
He has 2 apollo 16's so another 32.

So together we have 58.

The maximum with any DAW and apollo is 64 inputs.

What we did was unplug the gear from my analog mixer and connected to his apollo 16's through his DB25 snakes.

This is the word clock setup. My apollo 8 is master, then the word clock goes to my focusrite scarlett octopre, which has it's adat out into the apollo's adat in.
The scarlett octopre has a wordclock out, which goes into my octopre mark ii's word clock in. the octopre mark two's adat out goes into my twin. The 2 apollo 16's are slaved via thunderbolt, followed by 2 satellite octos, followed by the twin at the very end of the chain, so we are using the maximum 6 uad devices and 4 apollos being part of that (you can mix and match but no more than 4 apollos and 6 uad total).

My imac is only thunderbolt 1 and it has operated glitch free. The first thunderbolt imacs had 2 ports, of 10gb/s *each*, as each port was on it's own TB bus. Even with all that gear on the one bus we are not exceeding the possible bandwidth. I am not sure if the thunderbolt 2 imacs with only 2 ports use 2 busses or 1, i know the imac pro and mac pro have more than 1 bus.

Anyway.. Just because pro tools won't "see" more than 32 inputs from any interface, doesn't mean this isn't a great workaround. you see, you have to think of apollo console as it's own standalone 64 channel mixer, irrespective of what is recording into pro tools.

So when it comes time to record, it's very simple.
You use "pt mode" in the apollo, and create a different set of inputs for PT to "see". Once you have set this up and saved it in apollo you never ever have to do it again.

That's it. You save one set of 32 ins as an apollo/PT config, and pro tools sees those inputs, then you save the other set of 32.

Just flip the set when you want to record the second batch of 32 channels. 2 seconds in apollo and 5 seconds in PT to set up, literally.

SO simple..

SO.. if you do not have to RECORD more than 32 channels at one time into PT and that's put you off an Apollo, i thought this might be a handy tip.

You can still have a large 64 input array all playing together alongside the pro tools project audio/Vi's etc, and just record your outboard gear in two 32 channel passes.
:)