Hi,

you will find a usefull grafic in my TotalMix FX primer that helps a little bit with the understanding of signal flow.

https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … rnal-equi/

https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/index.ph … -Flow-jpg/

In short again:

top row - HW inputs

• These are your HW inputs on the recording interface.

• These signals are always passed through to the application ! (mute buttons are only active for your TM FX submixes that use this HW input)
  

Applications can access these HW inputs in two ways:
a) via ASIO driver, in cubase you need to define which available inputs and outputs you wanna use for your project
b) non-ASIO aware applications and the operating system via WDM driver. You can define WDM devices for inputs (and outputs) in the RME driver setting dialog.

middle row - SW playback channels

This is everything coming from the computer OS and applications.

a) from computer / OS (Windows default device)
Lets assume your monitors are connected to AN1/2 OUT.
In RME driver settings dialog
- you create a WDM device for an I/O port here Analog 1/2 and
- in the Speaker Tab you select AN 1/2 (x) so that a Speaker symbol is being created which you can assign as standard sound device.
From now on you will get audio output from Windows and non-aware ASIO applications through SW playback channel AN 1/2 OUT.
Routing: TM Submix mode: you click to the HW output / submix in the bottom row, where your monitors are connected to and raise the fader for SW playback AN 1/2. Thats it.

b) from Cubase (ASIO)
In cubase you need to select the RME ASIO driver.
Then you can create input and output channels that you want to use.
You do not need to define all, just the ones you require and can also store these settings separated for inputs and outputs.
These output channels match with the HW outputs of your recording interface.
Inside of Cubase you can route now Audio to any of these output channels.
In a standard case you might want to route everything also to Analog 1/2.
This would refer then also to SW Playback Channel Analog 1/2 like for the sound output of the WDM driver.

C) other ASIO aware application like i.e. Foobar2000 or MusicBee
Want to have this stuff on a separate SW playback channel ?
Then use in the ASIO settings of this application SW playback channel 5/6.
Then you have this audio stream also separate from the others and can do with it what you want and decide to what HW output you want to send it finally ....

Splitting the audio / routing:
If you want to split audio from OS and from DAW you can route everything from DAW to AN 3/4 OUT if you have this output in Cubase. This way Audio from Cubase would use now SW Playback Channel 3/4.
Now you have split this a little bit:
- Windows Sound output (SW Playback AN1/2)
- Cubase output (SW playback AN 3/4
- Well and asio-aware Music player to AN 5/6

Routing: at the end you can activate both again in your submix for your main monitors connected to HW out 1/2.
TM FX, Submix Mode: click to main out (AN 1/2 out) and make sure that the faders
- for SW Playback 1/2 (Windows) and
- for SW playback 3/4 (Cubase)
are raised.

Make up your mind, whether or how you want to separate:
- audio coming from RME WDM driver (audio from non asio aware applications)  and
- audio coming from ASIO aware applications like a DAW

Again the high level steps:

- In the DAW you define the channels you want to use from the ASIO driver.
- Then you see the audio coming from the DAW in TM in the middle row under SW playback channels.
- It uses those SW playback channels that correspond with the outputs that you defined as Cubase Outputs.
-  In the next step you decide for each HW output (which is also called a submix in RME terminology) which audio streams you want to route to a submix (click to Main Out, Phones, etc and raise the faders of the needed HW inputs and SW playback channels according to your use case ... actually what you need in your recording situation.

Latencies / top row + middle row:
- top row, directly from the HW inputs with near zero latency (only the little converter latency)
- middle row: which comes from the PC, with the RTL of the ASIO driver which depends on sample rate and ASIO buffersize

The higher the sample rate and the lower the ASIO buffersize, the lower the final RTL, but you get more CPU load with hither sample rates and lower ASIO buffer sizes.

Addition, if you want to route also in Cubase, then you will need more outputs defined in Cubase.
You can use as many channels as you want/need.
All this audio is being sent to the matching SW playback channels first.
Next step is to route the audio to the proper HW output where the phones are then really connected to.
And this can be any output, even ADAT, shall you have connected a phones preamp via ADAT..

So .. this Routing Concept of TM FX is simply genious, logic, flexible, phantastic.

And it brings all possibilities and demands under one hood.
And by the easy submix based routing (click to HW output, raise faders of HW inputs and SW playback channels)
you can easily get everything out of it what you need.

Additional tricks ease your work further, as you can
- copy paste the routing of a HW output / submic from one submix to another
- define on HW output as source and define serveral others as "mirror" of this source, then you need to change routing only on the source and all the other submixes get automatically the same adjusted routing.

Hope this makes it clearer !