Audio Interface Issue

[Willsie]

…I’d just add from my perspective I’m interested in other Mac users experience with it.

[DavidP]

@Willsie

I don’t know why this works this way. Might explain why some recordings I have uploaded to YouTube (e.g. Fire & Rain) only output on the left side

Seems odd that one input should be left and the other right by default.

And agree it would explain some of the previous recordings.

I think some tests into Reaper will be helpful to see what is going on.

Maybe there are some other config settings in a Mac?

But at least you can now make recordings and focus more on music making than all these technicalities.

WRT bookmarks. If I click on my avatar top right I see a bookmark icon. Check that for the bookmarked post?.

[Willsie]

@DavidP

WRT bookmarks. If I click on my avatar top right I see a bookmark icon. Check that for the bookmarked post?.

That’s it…great!
told post must be minimum 20 characters, so have to add this!

[Willsie]

@TheMadman_tobyjenner

Now get some recording done, so we can see all this has borne fruit

I’ll start work right away on Little Green Apples…

[Majik]

@DavidP

Seems odd that one input should be left and the other right by default.

It’s actually quite common. The audio interface driver will, often, just tell the Operating System how many channels it has. It doesn’t tell it anything about how those channels should be arranged.

In this case, when it sees two channels, the OS will make assumptions about what those channels should be used for

For a 2 in, 2 out audio interface, it’s normal to assume that is stereo in and stereo out.

On multiple-channel AIs, it’s common for the OS to assume that the outputs are a surround-sound system, even when they should be individual outputs or stereo pairs

Depending on what application you are using, there’s often a way to change this and tell the OS exactly how to treat the inputs and outputs.

For instance, on Pulseaudio/Pipewire on Linux with my UMC204HD I get the following options:

If I set it to “Analogue Surround 4.0 Output + Analog Stereo Input”, I get this:

If I set it to “Analog Stereo Input”, I get this:

And if I set it to “Pro Audio”, which means “treat each channel as an individual input/output”, I get this:

Alternatively, on a DAW, you can individually connect channels to mono or stereo (or multichannel) tracks.

Cheers,

Keith

[DavidP]

@Majik

It’s actually quite common. The audio interface driver will, often, just tell the Operating System how many channels it has. It doesn’t tell it anything about how those channels should be arranged.

Thanks Keith. I live and learn, learn, learn …

[Majik]

No problem, David.

The small part I didn’t mention is that, for most applications on a PC (including the OS itself) it’s important to map the AI channels in a particular default way. Otherwise every time you opened your web browser (for instance) you would have to configure which audio channels it used.

Having a default setup means you can just, mostly, use your PC without having to worry about how the audio works. Of course, it does get more complicated with multiple audio interfaces and audio interfaces with multiple channels.

You don’t need that with a DAW because you, typically, tell it that you are (for instance) creating two mono channels and then manually select which channel should be used for those tracks.

Cheers,

Keith