Switching from a desktop studio to laptop - presets?

Hi everyone

Hope you are all staying safe and well in these scary times.

I have a question regarding easily switching between project setups (I think that is the right phrase…).

I use Cubase Pro 10.5 on a Surface Book. Normally I use the Surface Book as a quasi-desktop in my home studio- so I switch the screen off and close the laptop lid but it’s connected to a dock, and from the dock I have everything set up - keyboard and mouse, a 4K monitor, CC121, audio interface (UR22), monitor speakers, USB inputs (piano + Roland V-Drums + Roland TR-08 drum machine).

Normally this is fine but I’d like to be able to disconnect the laptop from the dock and work on the projects without having to move any other hardware around (aside from the eLicenser). So for example I could do some recording and editing in the home studio, then unhook the laptop from the dock and go and sit on the couch in the living room doing some rough mixing, editing etc through headphones.

How would you suggest I go about this? I’m vaguely aware that I might need to use the internal soundcard of the laptop and set it up in Cubase, but is there a way to have two sets of presets - one for the home studio and one for mobile, that I can just quickly switch between when I take my project with me?

Hope that all makes sense.

Thank you!

Hi,

Yes, you would use built-in Audio Device. If you don’t have really complicated Control Room setup, it should work. Once you unplug your Audo Device, Cubase would ask, that there is no Audio Device anymore. And it should offer you to switch to other Audio Device.

And back, once you would connect your UR22, you would change the ASIO driver to UR22.

Cubase always tries to connect the Buses to something. As I said, if your setup is simple, it would connect as you would expect.

Thanks Martin :blush:

Simpler than I thought!

I have gone ahead and set up a Control Room so I have A as all the studio set up and B as the laptop speakers. It might be overcomplicating it though! I’ll find out after a few days of trying it.

Hi,

In the worse case, you can also save/load presets in the Audio Connections window.

But I believe, it will work just automatically.

I switch from external sound card to the laptop headphones all the time. I use the sound card asio drivers when it’s plugged in and the generic low latency one with headphones. Occasionally Cubase gets confused when starting a new project and flips it to 44khz, obvious because the sound starts clicking, just have to set it to 48khz in Project settings.

Gday.

I do exactly what you are hoping to do. I have my laptop connected to my interface (Focusrite 18i20) and to my two monitors in my studio and then if I want to take the laptop somewhere and do some editing I just unplug it all and when I launch Cubase on the laptop alone, it tells me that I will have to use the generic ASIO driver and I just click ok.
It should default to the internal sound card automatically when not using your interface, but I use windows.