Please help! Soundcraft ui24r confusion

knuckleberryfinn

Good afternoon. I've reached breaking point with trying to record with this thing and am in desperate need of help. I've had the ui24r for a few months, and have gigged with it plenty of times. I love it, it's brilliant. But now I want to use it to record (with Reaper) and it's being very confusing (almost certainly my fault - I hate this tech stuff). 

Anyway, I can get input channels working fine, and can record. The problem is, I can't listen to any of it! There's no audio coming from Reaper back to the ui24r. I managed to get my old Tascam thing to work, and a little Focusrite thing. But not this bugger. All hell gratefully received. 

Branshen

Are you trying to monitor directly from your soundcraft or through your DAW? Either way, you should check your settings.

If direct monitoring is off, and your DAW has input monitoring turned off, then your DAW will show that it is receiving signal and you will be able to hear playback after recording, but you won't hear any audio while recording.

equalsql

There's a Reaper Compatibility board on the Reaper Forum so it's worth posting your issue on there. The folks over there are very. helpful and have saved my bacon on numerous occasions so definitely worth a punt.

knuckleberryfinn

Branshen said:

Are you trying to monitor directly from your soundcraft or through your DAW? Either way, you should check your settings.

If direct monitoring is off, and your DAW has input monitoring turned off, then your DAW will show that it is receiving signal and you will be able to hear playback after recording, but you won't hear any audio while recording.

Thanks for replying @Branshen ;

I was trying to monitor from the Soundcraft, so: mic > Soundcraft > DAW (new and existing tracks) > Soundcraft > headphones. It must be a settings thing, but I can't work it out.

I've turned direct monitoring on for every track, but I'm unclear on what I need to do with the Reaper audio device settings. At present I've routed output to channels 1-32 of the Soundcraft. The ASIO drop-down isn't offering me any alternative. I think I need to do something with the Soundcraft monitoring settings, but I'm struggling to work out where the hell I go.

knuckleberryfinn

equalsql said:

There's a Reaper Compatibility board on the Reaper Forum so it's worth posting your issue on there. The folks over there are very. helpful and have saved my bacon on numerous occasions so definitely worth a punt.

Thanks @equalsql ;  I'll crawl over there if I can't work it out by next week (got to record a few students on Wednesday argh!)

kennedydream1980

There will be something in the Soundcraft menu regarding USB sends and returns. It’s the same on my behringer xr18. You have to reconfigure the USB sends to send the audio back to your DAW. I’m surprised there isn’t a YouTube tutorial regarding this.

Branshen

I've just re-read your original post and realised that I misread it the first time. 

Correct me if I still have this wrong. The issue you're facing is that after you've recorded something through the soundcraft, you can't play it back through the soundcraft. Presumably, your speakers are hooked up to the soundcraft.

If my above understanding is (finally) correct, can you monitor your guitar through the soundcraft? i.e. hear the guitar as you play through the soundcraft.

If it is playback that you're having trouble with, it may be a routing issue..

Stuckfast

Just downloaded the manual, that is super confusing!

First confusing thing is that, as far as I can see, channel 1 on the Soundcraft will show up as input 11 in Reaper, and so on, because channels 1-2 are the master out and 3-10 are the auxes. So in order to record a mic plugged into channel 1 you'd need to select input 11.

Now... each channel can have three possible sources, which are switched in its Patching Screen. They presumably all default to Local, which will mean that a mic plugged in to channel 1 becomes the source that is passed along the rest of the signal chain. If you want to monitor via Reaper instead, you'd need to set the source to USB-DAW.

So I guess there are two possible ways of handling recording to a DAW and monitoring.

The first is to set all the input channels to USB-DAW and give each of them its own track in Reaper, so input 1 on the mixer feeds a track in Reaper that has both input and output assigned to channel 11, and so on. That way, when a track in Reaper is record-enabled, the signal at input 1 will come into and out of Reaper before being heard on mixer channel 1 as usual. Once you've recorded something on that track and it's no longer record-enabled, the thing you've recorded on the track will be heard on mixer channel 1 during playback.

The other is to dedicate a single stereo channel on the mixer to USB returns from Reaper, and keep the other channels in Local mode. In this approach, the inputs on your recording tracks in Reaper are assigned as above -- to input 11 for channel 1, input 12 for channel 2 and so on -- but their outputs are all assigned to the same stereo output. This way, anything that's coming into the mixer from a mic or DI will be heard directly through the mixer channel rather than via Reaper, while everything you've already recorded comes back on a single stereo channel in the mixer.

Each approach has its pros and cons. If you use the latter you need to remember to mute Reaper tracks while recording because otherwise you'll hear each input twice. If you use the former you'll need to run Reaper at a low buffer size to avoid audible delay.

knuckleberryfinn

Branshen said:

I've just re-read your original post and realised that I misread it the first time. 

Correct me if I still have this wrong. The issue you're facing is that after you've recorded something through the soundcraft, you can't play it back through the soundcraft. Presumably, your speakers are hooked up to the soundcraft.

If my above understanding is (finally) correct, can you monitor your guitar through the soundcraft? i.e. hear the guitar as you play through the soundcraft.

If it is playback that you're having trouble with, it may be a routing issue..

Yes, that's correct. Except that the recording I'm currently dealing with wasn't recorded with the Soundcraft, which of course would be irrelevant if it wasn't for the fact that I've just discovered that even the input routing from the Soundcraft into Reaper is not working 1-to-1, 2-to-2, etc. Neither is it working as @Stuckfast describes (thank you @Stuckfast for your comprehensive reply -- I'm still attempting to process it). Currently all inputs are routing to Reaper 1 and 2 (presumably a L and R routing, which frankly I don't understand). I cannot work out how to stop it from doing this, let alone get the monitoring of already-recorded tracks working. It's way beyond my skillset. 

The solutions @Stuckfast outlines are a bit much for my brain to handle -- sorry! So, I wonder if there is a DAW with which Soundcraft works more intuitively? My loyalty to Reaper has suffered a pretty substantial hit in the last few days.

Again, thank you for your help everyone. It is much appreciated.

Stuckfast

Yes all the inputs will eventually go to 1/2 in Reaper, because that receives the master output from the console. 

What you need to do is set your Reaper record tracks to receive inputs 11 and upwards instead. This is always one of those settings I struggle to find in Reaper -- I think clicking on the channel meter might take you there?

knuckleberryfinn

@Stuckfast I've now done this, and it works! Soundcraft input 8 is routing to DAW input 18. 

I have no idea why this would be a design decision on the part of Soundcraft/Reaper/both. 

Anyway, I'm now attempting to set up a stereo out from Reaper back to the Soundcraft for monitoring, as per @Stuckfast's second solution above. Will let you know how it goes... 

Stuckfast

Nice one!

It's not Reaper's fault, it's down to the design of the console.

(It would be more logical to have the master and auxes be the highest numbered DAW inputs, and have the individual mixer channels correspond directly to the DAW inputs starting at 1. My guess is that they did it the other way around because there are larger and smaller versions of the console available. I expect they all have the same master and auxes, but there might be different numbers of input channels.)

Branshen

knuckleberryfinn said:

@Stuckfast I've now done this, and it works! Soundcraft input 8 is routing to DAW input 18. 

I have no idea why this would be a design decision on the part of Soundcraft/Reaper/both. 

Anyway, I'm now attempting to set up a stereo out from Reaper back to the Soundcraft for monitoring, as per @Stuckfast's second solution above. Will let you know how it goes... 

Hurrah! Well done guys. 

knuckleberryfinn

"It's not Reaper's fault, it's down to the design of the console." I think this is one of my problems - I have no idea what is doing what!

I can't work out how to assign the outputs from Reaper to go back to the Soundcraft and actually work. None of the terminology makes any sense. Now I want to go and live in a monastery somewhere and never have to think about computers again.  

Stuckfast

OK, so in order to hear the output from Reaper through the console you will probably need to visit the Patching Screen on the console. There you should be able to set the source of a stereo channel (or two mono channels) to USB DAW.

So let's say you set channels 7 and 8 on the console to USB DAW. Then, I think, you should be able to set your stereo master output in Reaper to outputs 17/18 and I'd expect it to come up on those two channels. 

(If the console has dedicated stereo channels that would be better.)

knuckleberryfinn

Maybe I won't need to go to the monastery quite yet: output is now reaching the interface and coming out the headphone socket. Incredible! The only issue now is that the signal (coming out of both L and R of headphones) is from the L channel of the mix only. So Reaper's L is being rendered as mono on the Soundcraft.

Annoying. But...I will be victorious. 

knuckleberryfinn

Stuckfast said:

OK, so in order to hear the output from Reaper through the console you will probably need to visit the Patching Screen on the console. There you should be able to set the source of a stereo channel (or two mono channels) to USB DAW.

So let's say you set channels 7 and 8 on the console to USB DAW. Then, I think, you should be able to set your stereo master output in Reaper to outputs 17/18 and I'd expect it to come up on those two channels. 

(If the console has dedicated stereo channels that would be better.)

I pressed Patch 1:1, everything went quiet, and I forgot how I got it to work. Shit. But never mind - it was only bodged together anyway.

So, starting over, I understand the input routing (1 goes to 11, 2 to 12, etc) and have got that working, but I'm now trying to patch to USB-DAW and am only getting sound from channel 8. Channel 7 shows activity in the soundbar thing, but it makes no difference where I route it to: sound only comes from channel 8.

I have absolutely no idea what any of this is or does (there are loads of patching options and I'm just staring at it with no clue), so I'm going to have to start from scratch I think, and actually learn what it all means. The important thing is that I can scrape through the recordings next week, so thank you for your help @Stuckfast and @Branshen . You probably saved some hardware from meeting a violent end. 

kennedydream1980

Check out this video. 

https://youtu.be/IvF4H-aAsGg