Ok so I've been interested in producing music, I guess mainly EDM but other things also interest me, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is for me to rant about all the annoying shit that has happened with my ~3 - 4 month struggle to just be able to fucking try making music without feeling like I'm trying to wrestle a fucking polar bear while simultaneously furiously jacking my flaccid dick.
So, this all started when I got interested in synthesizers and bought an arturia microbrute. I quickly learned that just using the 1/8 in headphone out of my arturia microbrute and sending it to the microphone in of my computer wouldn't cut it as far as audio quality goes, so I purchased a Steinberg Ur22MkII USB Audio Interface.
So I didn't actually notice a lot of the problems with my Ur22MkII for awhile because I was more than content making shitty little tracks that had the same sequence blaring from the microbrute for 2 minutes and a simple Volca Sample drum track playing in the background. Then I actually wanted to make something interesting and worth other people's time so I decided I could record a simple groove and then overdub, cut, chop, and replace parts of the audio to actually make an interesting song. Well, nope, because my Audio Interface is missing a fucking chromosome (Or maybe I am, but at this point I don't give a fuck).
So here is where I'm going to describe all the vile, disgusting, and quite frankly mind numbingly frustrating shit that I had to wade through. Firstly, I discovered that my Audio Interface has terrible latency so overdubbing was near impossible. Just an ASIO driver problem, right? Welp, my audio interface wasn't recognized as an ASIO device by reaper, or audacity. I'll just go update the drivers for my STEINBERG device, and if you aren't aware, Steinberg literally fucking invented the ASIO standard. Well it appears there is nothing explicitly referred to as "ASIO drivers" on the Steinberg website, so I simply updated every driver available to me. Restarted my computer, and voila! Guess what happened! FUCK ALL! My audio interface still is not recognized as an ASIO device by ANY of the DAWs I try.
Now, after weeks of neglecting my synthesizer and just not making music because I was fed up I decided to give it another go, and I'll say, I certainly got farther this time, not by much, but it's something. So I thought maybe Steinberg's DAW (Cubase) would definitely 100% detect my audio interface as an ASIO device, right..right? Apparently not. I gave up for about another week then decided to give it another go, and oh my god, yes, cubase asked me which ASIO DEVICE I WANT TO SELECT, AND MY UR22MKII WAS IN THE LIST! I frantically selected my Steinberg Ur22MkII and was excited to get to work, so I downloaded a few highly regarded VSTs and set to work, so I did a few little test runs and fuck me in the god damn ass with a rusty spoon. Ur22MkII still records the playback. So I go to the driver settings of my Ur22MkII and disable "loopback." Now I can't even hear playback after trying every monitoring option available to me in Cubase. Oh yeah, I also can't hear the out put of any of my VSTs but I can clearly see in the Cubase Mixer that there is sound because the level jumps up when I hit a key on my midi keyboard.
So that brings me here, today, really fucking pissed and my hands a little sore from writing all that shit, and I ask you, should I just go buy a mixer like a see every mildly successful music producer do? I don't need an enormous mixer like the big boys but a smaller 4 - 8 input one may do the trick for me.
tl;dr I've had a shit ton of problems with my audio interface and I have tried to fix them, believe me. Should I just buy a mixer to record and play back all my audio?
Thanks in advance buds.
Submitted January 21, 2017 at 03:03PM by Dynamyght https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/5pbvqt/should_i_just_buy_a_mixer/?utm_source=ifttt