Blue Snowball iCE - Has anyone got this working under Cubase

Cubase
#1

Hi folks,

Has anyone got the Blue Snowball iCE working under Cubase on a PC? my problem is that it uses USB drivers that seem to conflict with the Steinberg UR44 drivers. The people at Blue pretty much shrugged their shoulders at me and said that some people had got it working but it was up to me to figure out how. It seems that Cubase cannot run two USB devices at once under a PC according to the support team at Blue.

It’s a class-compliant device with no drivers. It runs under USB, and the UR44 drivers will not see it. It runs fine under windows, and even Wavelab recognises it simultaneously with the UR44, but I’m getting no joy with the UR44 and Cubase 8 Pro. Has anyone actually got this working at all? If so how did you do it?

Just to make things a little worse for myself I’m running Windows 10. I don’t think the problem is a Windows 10 issue, but if it is let me know!

Okay,

DanielP

#2

Hi, and welcome,

This is general behavior of (almost) all ASIO drivers. You can use one ASIO driver only (if it’s not multi-client ASIO) in any application (using ASIO). So you can use UR44 ASIO driver only, or Blue Snowball iCE ASIO driver only.

#3

I managed to get it working with some help from the support team at Blue. You need the ASIO4All 2 drivers. Here is the method:

Install the ASIO4all drivers with the offline settings. Put them in advanced mode. Then you have to set the UR44 inputs and Snowball inputs on the offline settings to active (the snowball will have an automatic conversion to 44.1 box ticked – I left that as it was.)

Here’s the first tricky part – Cubase does not recognise the Asio4all drivers as an option at first. A dialogue box pops up asking me to choose an ASIO driver but Asio4all is not listed. Cancel the dialogue box, and select Asio4all manually from inside Cubase.

With that sorted, Cubase will show the inputs of the Snowball along with the inputs and outputs of the UR44. More shenanigans - it will report back that the Snowball inputs are inactive even when ticked, but this is misleading. The Snowball inputs should work okay, but only once an audio track has been set up for them and set to record. I set up a Mono audio input, set up an audio track to record off that input, and it worked fine (both recording and playback from the snowball and UR44.)

While the snowball may not be the best mic you can buy, its pretty convenient for jotting down quick ideas at your desktop. It’s not good without DAW support, but with ASIO4All drivers even that is possible with a USB interface. Mind you, I would only use this for jotting down ideas - I’d still use the UR44 drivers unless I especially wanted to use the Snowball Mic.

#4

Hi.

Yes ASIO4All is virtual multi-client ASIO, so you can use two (or more) device with it. But it’s a virtual/ driver, so you will get heigher latency with comparison of real UR44 driver.