Re: X32 Rack as a Soundcard interface....for an ekit....
I wanted to throw a hypothetical set-up past you guys...
I'm in the middle of investigating the use of addictive drums or superior drummer for live use. I downloaded the trial software of addictive and the sounds and feel are great in comparison to my roland TD-12 kit. So what I need to do now is find a dedicated computer, an external soundcard, usb / firewire interface with low latentcy and at least four outputs to interface with my E-kit.
Now here comes the question...
Could I open reaper, use superior drummer or addictive drums in reaper, and connect it via USB to the X32 rack recording card thus routing the outputs to channels?
I guess it's no different than using it as a reverb or delay or comp plug in no?
Just trying to wrap my head around the whole thing, and I don't want to have to spend an arm and a leg on a mac and some firewire interface to get low latentcy. My experiments to date have run from not usable latentcy to "ok"... more experiments tonight...
Depends on exactly how you're looking to run things. If you're going to just use the drum VST and simply send it out, via usb, to the console then latency of the VST, USB link etc... is really irrelevant (who cares if sound actually comes out of the speakers 37 ms after you pressed the "Play" button on the drum vst).
On the other hand, if you're thinking in terms of playing the drum VST from the attached laptop via USB, and simultaneously trying to play other instruments, along with the drums, into the console AND you want to send those other instruments out of the console, into the PC for multitrack recording, now you'll have sonme weirdness to deal with since the other/external instruments will sound to be "in time" with the drum playback but the subsequent multitrack recording will sound out of time (the external instruments will slightly delayed behind the drums).
Reason being is that when you hit play on the drums VST, system latency will cause you to not actually hear the drums through the speakers immediately (lets say you have a 20ms delay here). So, you hear the drums start, you start playing along with them but now, the external instruments that are playing along with the drums will suffer an additional latency when you send them back to the PC for multitrack recording (let's say that this "return trip" latency might be another 20ms). The result will be that the external instruments will end up being around 40ms late, relative to the drum's vst (the combination of the outbound latency of the drum vst plus the inbound latency of the external instrument tracks).
Entirely fixable, in post production, by time shifting the external instrument tracks but you'll probably have to play with the time shift to get everything to drop into a good groove.
