I guess some of you use this, be it Skype or something else, where a client dials in and wants to listen in on the session, or you have a VO recording session and want to send good quality audio directly into the Skype feed from N8 or your audio interface. How do you guys on Windows do that? It’s easy on Mac, but since I switched to PC in my studio, there’s a lot for me to figure out in these regards. What special tools for audio routing do you use? Or do you have a special Skype machine and hook those up with good old cables?
Hello,
Yes, technically, you can do internal routing to make it happen.
Because we’re in broadcast facilities with everything on a router we use a separate computer. Doesn’t need to be much, we’ve even used one of the engineering laptops before.
Work through everything multiple times with a patient test subject before you try it with your client.
H
On both Mac / PC I’ve had cases where I routed Skype/whatever through the built-in computer audio i/o, and hardwired using s/pdif to the sound card. I found that worked pretty well since there was no sharing between softwares of interfaces.
I got the cables, I wireed everything up as you suggested and it works like a charm. I always looked for the “in the box software” solution to somehow route audio internally, never thinking about just hooking up wires.
Added benefit of that is that I can use the built-in soundcard for all windows related sound and reserve my Apollo interface for the DAWs without conflicts of drivers taking away focus and such stuff.
Works great and thanks to my Apollo Console, I can now nicely route audio via Cue Busses to the Windows soundcard (and thus Skype) and play Windows sounds over my monitors if I wish, or just mute it
Are you saying you’ve created a loopback from your PC motherboard out to in on the one compuer. Or youre running your DAW out to a separate computers onboard audio ins?
In the cases where I did this it was with digital out connections, yes. Lightpipe or coax, but S/PDIF in both cases. My latest motherboard has only optical out, and my interface coax in, so I’m not doing that at home any longer. And come to think of it, I think the studio where I set this up has a new iMac which doesn’t allow for it without an additional interface so in that case we went with software for internal routing.
