Hi. I’m using Cubase with a Presonus Firestudio Project interface, which leaves me with having to use the headphone output from the Firestudio to listen to the music I’m working on in Cubase. At the same time, I have a very good sound card with good speakers plugged into it, which I’d often prefer to use instead of the headphones which I have plugged into the Firestudio.
I could unplug the speakers from the rear of my PC tower to plug them into the Firestudio whenever I launch Cubase, but that is too much effort, and I don’t want to wear the speaker cable out with excessive moving and bending.
It would be ideal in this situation if I could use the Firestudio for all my regular inputs and outputs, but select my PC’s dedicated soundcard to receive the master bus output, so that I could listen to everything through my PC speakers.
As far as I know, I can’t currently do this in Cubase, as everything gets set to a single audio device.
A related issue that I have with Cubase has to do with tracks losing their bus routing when the audio device is changed in Cubase. While I record using the Firestudio as my interface, when it comes to final mixing and mastering, I like to do that using my speakers that are plugged into my sound card. When I switch the audio device in Cubase, the tracks lose their routing with the Firestudio, and when I change the audio device back to the Firestudio, I have to reconfigure all my track routing - which can be a very large and cumbersome task.
Also, if I launch Cubase and a project without my Firestudio already turned on, which can happen by mistake if I don’t think to switch my recording rack on first, then I’ll also lose all my track bus routing as Cubase defaults to using my PC audio device (which is good, apart from losing all the bus routing).
A possible good solution would be Cubase saving bus routing according to audio device that’s selected in Device Setup, so that when the device is changed, and then changed back, the previous track bus routing that was used with that device is reloaded.
I’ve got answers for you, but you’l first have to give us more/better details like what version of Cubase are you using (hint: control room and a headphone amp or using the phone option of your good soundcard;-) )
Hi. I’m using Cubase Pro 8.5, and while tracking I use the headphone jack on the Firestudio Project while wearing headphones. When not tracking, I have no need to turn on my rack gear, so if I just load up Cubase, the sound device will change. Then the audio comes out of my PC speakers, which are plugged into an Auzentech Prelude soundcard.
Aha, Well cubase isn’t multi-device friendly (at least at the windows platform), so for the moment I’m afraid it’s not possible without re-configuring or work with presets in vst-connections.
@fellow forum members: … chime in! It’s interesting how the MAC platform copes with this.
I know about ASIO4ALL, but I did not purpose this one as there are capable soundcards involved which have native asio drivers, so using these to bypass the shortcoming of easy device switching in cubase you lose ASIO stability. ASIO4ALL works most of the times very well but with soundcards which do not have hardware asio support. So the outcome of using a ASIO4ALL on a hardware asio capable soundcard would be not a best practise.
For the switching devices part it would be perfect.
i had FR long time ago for “ASIO 3” to have capability of all sound cards working together in windows… i wish it will be possible, guess its most be microsoft and steinberg efforts and development
I agree. The current system is simply not fit for purpose — not to a professional standard at any rate. The complete and unretrievable loss of routing settings every time you change ASIO drivers is a monumental PITA — perhaps the biggest single headache for me. Every time I take my MacBook Pro out of the studio and do editing, using the on-board soundcard, Cubase loses all the external FX routing information I have set up to use with my RME rackmount system back in the studio. The user should be able to (a) save this stuff so it can be loaded again later, just as with any other preferences; and (b) have the choice to save such routing globally or per project.
Can’t assist with the other issues but maybe something like this could be an option for switching speaker connections back/forth from your Firestudio and PC outputs to a set of speakers. There might be less expensive ones out there. I just choose this one as an example.
You can also use the control room if you have cubase pro, just need extra output channels and a cheap headphone amp, then all is switchable in Cubase and when using WDM audio drivers channel 1 & 2 are the main output channels. Or a good monitor controller.
This shouldn’t be an ongoing “large and cumbersome task.” Once you have each configuration set up, save it as a preset. Then you only have to load the desired preset instead of re-doing the entire configuration. The presets for each tab in VST Connections are specific to each tab, so you’d need to change them in both the Input & Output tabs (and Studio if using it).
