Quote:
Originally Posted by easyrider
Yeah I see that now. Thanks for pointing it out. As I say I'm pretty new to Pro tools so its all a learning curve for me,
I was just highlighting it wasn't a cabling or hardware routing issue so to keep my sanity I tried in the 2 DAWS I mentioned.
I now understand that Pro Tools I/O matching requirements are stricter than other DAWS
Ok no worries thanks for taking the time to respond. I can totally understand your frustration at my responses...I think I just needed nursing through as I feel a tad daunted by the complexity of things when I have used other DAWS.
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No excuse my curtness, I was dealing with other issues on the weekend, and just could not spend time on this with you.
The better way of saying this is almost every problem that happens with no signal through a hardware insert with Pro Tools is because of the silly 1:1 IO port pairing that it uses. Extremely non flexible but that is how it is. Like it's so frustrating that almost every occurrence is ultimately caused by this, and it's something else confusing folks when they think they have stuff set up correctly but it comes back to this pairing not being correct. So really really try to check out you have paired I/O.
And to the point that I really would stop with anything more complex and create a new totally trivial session (i.e. no track inputs used for anything) and just one mono pre-recorded audio track with a hardware insert on it. Delete and default all IO. And just use a straight through audio cable as the insert "device" to troubleshoot... and even better for chasing signals/working out what is going on you can plug a set of analog headphones through a mono adapter (e.g. so it powers only one side of the headphone), or a small speaker connected to a cable. you can probe the insert outputs to check if they have signal. Or you can drive an AC signal from signal gen though the insert and probe the insert outputs with a multimeter and find exactly to what Physical IO stuff is going.
The reason to make sure you were not using aggregates is if people do then it's easier to get confused about the IO numbering... Pro Tools then requires you match the IO number in the aggregate not the individual sub-interfaces.
Now my mention of LLM may have confused things, if you have an active record monitoring/input monitoring through an insert and turn on LLM the insert is bypassed just like a software plugin insert, meaning you would alway hear signal it's just not going though the physical insert. The point of mentioning that is not that it will cause no signal conditions at least in simplest cases, but it will cause no processing though the hardware insert, and it's probably the second most confusing thing with hardware inserts and just confuses folks so much that I wanted you to make sure LLM is of in anything you do. And sometimes when folks talk about hardware inserts we don't know if the insert is on a track, on an aux from an input, on a aux from a send from a track, etc. and so it helps to clarify that (in some of those cases LLM can disable the send so in that case LLM will make the insert not work). All good reasons to always troubleshoot signal flows with LLM disabled.
Another confusion I've seen with folks is if they are using hardware monitoring in an interface and turn on a hardware insert... the hardware monitoring can do things like make it appear as if signal is going through the hardware insert when it might not be (e.g. the IO pairs really don't match), or you may have two paths, hardware monitoring and hardware insert and maybe some nasty phase stuff happening. All causes total confusion and tail chasing, been there myself. But IIRC your interface does not have hardware monitoring so that won't be an issue.
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Once you have this working you will need to look at latency, Pro Tools should automatically correct for the insert latency caused by the interfaces input and output conversion latency and buffer sizes getting signal to there, but it won't correct for the latency for the signal going though the outboard processor itself, and it does not have a ping function. So you can look up latency specs, or measure with ping with another DAW or measure by hand with pro Tools and enter that latency in ms in the Setup>IO>Insert page.