Working with 2 audio interfaces

Cubase
1

edit: Accidentally posted it in the Cubase 10 forums, but I did since upgrade to 11, not that it makes a difference as the issue is the same in both, but if a moderator sees this, feel free to move it to Cubase 11 forum.

Hi,

I’m struggling really hard to finding a good way to work with Cubase with two different audio interfaces (not at once).
My use cases are either me being by my studio setup (proper big audio interface), or just wanting to sit in the living room with my laptop (built in audio).

Whenever you use Cubase with a different audio interface, it seems to forget all my routings in my audio connection for control room and hw effects, and when I hook my laptop up to my studio setup again, I have to load preferences, and hope I didn’t load my template by accident, as that has monitoring on all my inputs which causes nice loud feedback if I use my laptop built in audio i/o.

Anyway, my ideal scenario would be that I could launch into a profile that has my laptop only routings all setup, as well as launch into a profile that has my studio setup.
Is this possible at all via command line or something? Like launch cubase with the path to my profile or something…

It may sound small and trivial doing the routing stuff every time, but it’s annoying, and it’s a small thing that makes me go “ahh nah I’ll just run live instead when I’m just on my laptop”.
I love using cubase, but I hate that it’s so awkward to use away from my main setup.

Anyone have any input or suggestions for this?

Being able to select profiles before Cubase launches would’ve been a good fix for this. Having to first start it up, and then select a profile, and being forced to restart again for it to activate is a bit awkward.

PS. The dongle isn’t really making this easier either, but I’m fine with that for now at least. Losing my audio routings all the time has gotten quite tedious though.

edit: Accidentally posted it in the Cubase 10 forums, but I did since upgrade to 11, not that it makes a difference as the issue is the same in both, but if a moderator sees this, feel free to move it to Cubase 11 forum.

2

So, it’s the same laptop that you use in the studio and the living room? (I don’t get the dongle comment if so, is it plugged into a hub when in studio and therefore a pain to remove each time?)

My immediate thought is that you could create a batch (.bat) file that copies across your preferences from a neutral location (i.e. C:\Cubaseprefs\Studio and C:\Cubaseprefs\Portable or something) to the default/live location, and those same batch files opens Cubase. So you’d just have the two shortcuts to load into whichever profile you want.

Not sure which pref files would need to copy across, just the ports and global ones i imagine.

Only danger is that if you change some settings you’d need to manually copy the changes to the neutral location or they’d be over-written when you next launch.

You on windows or mac?

3

Heya, thanks for the reply.
Yeah it’s the same laptop.
Dongle sits in a usb hub in the back of my desk, and since I got a fairly recent macbook I need to use a dongle to begin even using the dongle directly with my macbook.

I use Mac OS.
Your workaround might actually work, but I really hope that’s not the only sound way to do this. It’s not just the preferences file that you’d need to change I think, since it’s the audio routings as well.

Ideally Cubase would know if my currently selected audio interface has previously been configured, and use those previous routings.

It really is far from ideal the way it works. I think it’d be fine if it did let me pick a profile before actually launching Cubase. The profile manager is great, but since it forces you to first start up in the last selected one before changing profile it feels like a bit odd logic :slight_smile:

4

I understand your need … I posted the similar issue some months ago: I usually work with an RME interface, but sometimes - when recording from my Motif XF, I use the Yamaha Firewiredriver (for obvious reasons). I understand that they cannot be used at the same time, but I would love to see that switching the driver in cubase automatically selects a corresponding set of presets for the audio connections! The automatism cubase uses when we switch interface in one project makes it almost impossible to work this way. The problem is even bigger since there is no common preset for all audio connections, but instead one set per type (input, output, etc.).

The simple straight forward solution would be that the audio connections presets are internally linked to one audio interface. So by switching the audio interface in the project simply changes the audio connections to whatever we have prepared.

That would be very, very helpful!

5

Yeah that would be perfect.
I guess this isn’t a “need” I have, but I really like working with Cubase, and if I just want to try something without powering everything up in the music setup, it’d be nice being able to just start it on my laptop without having to care about audio connections. Right now I just don’t use it at all away from my bigger setup, as it’s a hassle, which is a shame.