[The Weed]

I'm going to bump this to extol the virtues of RME's TotalMix, something I was leery of at first and now can't live without.

I’ve been trying to help a blind guy in Rome, Italy get Cleanfeed and similar into his DAW (Reaper). He’s on Windows and was trying to use Voicemeeter to do it, but, of course, being blind it’s very difficult for him, if not impossible.

I explained to him, as I did above, how I have my onboard soundcard cabled into my interface (RME UFX) to get audio from - and to - a browser-based, two-way audio/video app like Cleanfeed and then use Pre-Fader Sends to route any audio I want going back to the browser app to an output on my interface and cable that back to the Line In on my onboard soundcard. Old school, but it works.

Unfortunately, he has an Apollo Solo, and UAD doesn’t play all that well with Windows or Chrome apparently. So, he was thinking of getting another interface like an Audient Evo 4, which is great in one respect as it has Loopback built in.

It got me thinking about how I could route signals into and out of Pro Tools or just to my speakers without using physical cables like I’m doing now.

Getting audio back to a browser app is easy enough using TotalMix, just Loopback the signal at the output to the same input on the interface and set that input as the default in Control Panel>Sound>Recording Tab, and the browser will use that as the “microphone”. In my case that’s output/input 5.

The tricky part is getting the browser audio to Pro Tools. I set the default for the Playback Tab to ADAT 1-2. Then I opened the ADAT 1-2 channel in the Software Playback section of TotalMix and routed its output to ADAT 3-4 in the Hardware Output section and Loopbacked that output to the ADAT 3-4 input in the Hardware Input section of TotalMix. (You have to show ADAT 3-4 channel in both Hardware sections too.) Then I set the input of a Stereo Track in Pro Tools to ADAT 3-4. The sound before, being cabled in was okay, but, without any audio playing, you could hear a background sort of hiss, especially in headphones. Now, the audio is crystal clear, even in my headphones, no background anything.

To just send the onboard soundcard’s audio to my speakers, I just route the ADAT 1-2 channel’s signal to them and unroute the audio going to ADAT 3-4. I just made two different Presets in TotalMix, one for browser audio into and out of Pro Tools and one for the onboard soundcard’s audio just to go to my speakers. Because RME’s drivers are multi-client, I can do this and not freak out Pro Tools.

And this is all without any physical cables and without anything being attached to my ADAT connections. Virtual “cables” and virtual “inputs and outputs”.

There are some settings in the Properties of both the Playback and Recording defaults that I found I needed to change, and I’ll go into those settings if anyone is at all interested. Which no one probably is. You may not have even read this far before nodding off.

The funny thing is, for me anyway, I think I’ve delved fairly deeply into TotalMix and yet I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do <sigh>