Jeesus. This website is almost as bad as Total MIX for usability. Asking me if I'm a robot again!!?

Anyway. I'm on a PC (win7) with a hardware mixer plugged into AN1/2 as stereo, my speaker going out from AS 1/2.

Windows sound gives me options of Speaker or Analog 3/4, so I select Speakers....sigh....let me just run through it again as quick as I can.
1. FULL reset of Total MIX, then add in Phones 1 by "assigning" Phones 1 in control room to PH3/4
2. Crank up every single fader I can see, for all Hardware Outputs
3. Click Loopback on first one then every single channel, maxing out any and all faders I see for both hardware inputs and Software playback channels (including those little ones that send the signal....well no-one knows where the signal goes of course)
4. Open Cubase, set a loop going
5. Open OBS, add various audio input captures, and try every single combination of devices, monitoring settings, etc etc, and never ONCE seeing a drop of audio from Cubase touching OBS's meters.
6. Repeat for 3 solid hours until you are so sick of RME that you consider using Windows default low latency drivers instead.
7. Repeat all of the above with first 2, then 0 WDM devices selected.

Total MIX just doesn't seem capable of consistently routing a WDM signal.

Why is it so hard for RME to be able to provide a complete and detailed explanation how this product works? It's because no-one at RME actually knows isn't it...

https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=30350

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the quick response.

Sorry if my posts seemed rude. I am very frustrated by this problem, but am grateful for your help.

Please just bear in mind I've spent almost a full day on this now, and that is time I wanted to spend making music (actually putting together a little production tutorial, which is why I need OBS...but I digress). Many of the "solutions" to this problem I've found on google seem to involve using 3rd party plugins like Flowerchild etc rather than native RME loopback functionality to record from their DAWs, so again, I am clearly not alone in having some trouble in this area.

The focus of my problem, to summarise, is the loopback, and why I cannot get this loopback into OBS. (I managed to get it to work a few months ago, but can't work out what settings have changed that now make it impossible. The huge number of combination of setting is why this process is so frustrating)

Regarding the official RME tutorials. They are certainly fine for the basics, but have no-where near enough detail for any sort of troubleshooting. The manual isn't much help there either really.

For example...There is no indication in the manual, or in the tutorials what "Number of WDM devices" actually does. What are these "devices"? Why is the number of them set via an RME control panel if they are a native Windows service that just run in parallel with ASIO? Does setting the number of devices to zero stop WDM audio streams in the system or, as you suggest, is this setting only relevant to monitoring in TM?

Here is an excerpt from the manual:

This indicates that setting made in Babyface have a material impact on WDM devices, and that setting WDM devices to zero would mean no WDM stream on any device....but is not detailed enough to actually be helpful.

Maybe these are topics that are too much like "basic general computer audio" questions, but since RME chose to include so many ways to alter them in its software it seems strange this isn't covered in much more detail. Instead I feel like I have to now go away and learn about the entire Windows OS audio handling, just to be able to understand what Total MIX does with loopback.

I am happy to go away and follow any links you might have to learn about this, as I am struggling to find any document which adequately explains these things.

> I am happy to go away and follow any links you might have to learn about this,
> as I am struggling to find any document which adequately explains these things.

See post #3.

Under Windows you always need to differentiate between ASIO and WDM.

Every professional audio application has ASIO and uses the ASIO for low latency.

But the RME ASIO driver also offers compatibility to the Windows Operation System
und the "normal" applications like Firefox, etc which do not support ASIO
in form of WDM devices.

WDM devices I personally only need for the speakers, to hear sound from Youtube
or for sounds coming from the OS (although those I personally disabled).

So everything that you do in terms of audio Processing should use the ASIO driver
for lowest latency and best quality audio processing.

For all the rest (Windows, Firefox and all other appplications that do not support ASIO) use the WDM driver.

Thats it ...

Thanks to everyone for responding. I am very impressed with the speed you guys got back to me. I'll read through those links shortly.
[Edit - I just wanted to add that, this snag aside, my experience of RME has been excellent. Both the product and the support! ]

However...I do now have audio in OBS. I had to download the OBS-ASIO github plugin to get this to work though, WDM apparently just doesn't work with Babyface and OBS. (there is an unanswered thread on the OBS forum specifically about Babyface and a few people are experiencing the same problem, so it seems babyface may have a particular issue with WDM in OBS)

I'll post my particular solution here in case it helps anyone else, but the essential item is OBS-ASIO.
1. Download latest OBS-Asio from the "releases" tab on Github
2. Install it, then reboot the PC
3. Open OBS (clearing out all my previously added Audio Inputs) and add the newly available "ASIO" source (which is what is provided by OBS-Asio)
4. In the OBS Asio properties page, set Device to "ASIO Fireface USB", OBS channel 1 to ADAT1, channel 2 to ADAT2.
5. Check your sample rates are the same between OBS and Cubase. I used 44.1kHz and increased my buffer from 256 to 512 samples to give the CPU some headroom.
6. "WDM devices" in Babyface settings should be set to "1"
7. Cubase VST Connections - Both inputs and outputs to AN1/2
8. Open Total Mix. Select AS1/2 in bottom left, switch on Loopback.
9. All volume faders are fully down except AS1/2 Hardware output and AN1/2 Software playback which are at 0dB.

Only took 12 hours and a free bit of software to achieve.

Chrome doesn't support ASIO.
It uses the Windows Default Audio Driver.

Again, in the RME driver setting dialog you need
- to create a WDM device for the I/O port where your speakers are connected to i.e. Analog 1/2 or smth like this check
- there is a 2nd TAB "Speaker", there you define the Speaker device, this creates the entry for your speaker connected to the RME interface in the Windows Sound settings

Then in the Windows Sound settings you set this particular device as your standard sound device, thats it.

If you play sound through audio the application will send audio then to the default Windows audio device (RME WDM driver -> Speaker).

Hello all! I hope you're doing well despite the difficult times. I have a question for mac users who would like to stream through OBS and use the TotalMix as an audio input. For some reason the Audio Input Capture on OBS does not get a signal from TotalMix which is odd as I've tested the audio and am able to record into Logic.

I've even tried using an audio capture software (iShowU) through the Audio MIDI Setup and it seems like that doesn't work either. There was a brief moment this morning when I managed to aggregate both the software playback and computer audio together on OBS but frustratingly enough I tried other things and have not been able to find my way back.

Probably spent now over 18 hours trying to figure this out, including testing other direct-USB mics into OBS to see if it's an OBS issue but I don't think so (perhaps it just needs a workaround).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!