Thanks mate,

Sorry for my ignorance, 'not familiar with using outboard gear in Cubase.

As the card came with only one toslink cable, I'm guessing I'll need another one to rig it up for Cubase external effects configuration?

Another thing related to this is that I have a bunch of 4 track reel to reel tapes of my past bands and would like run the 4 tracks into Cubase and have them on 4 separate audio tracks. Just asking to make sure the ADA8200 (or equivalent) and AIO can do that.

Thanks a lot for any advice.

Thank you so much, now I just have to find one those ADA8200 things or something similar and I'm in business!

Cheers mate, and keep well.

Mauri in sunny Oz.

In the aio setting where you set buffer size etc you can also set the number of wdm devices (another tab of that app) set it to 1 for stereo out. And enable multiclient mixing

Hi

routing for external effects:

In Cubase easily possible by simply defining input and output channel of your effect and the DAW then pings through to calculate the RTT for it. Then you can use it like a VST.

In TotalMix FX you can decide on your own, whether you want the flexible TM FX routing capabilities for monitoring, external effects etc (or to use DAW mode, where you route exclusively in the DAW, which I would not do, but tastes are different).

Then you have an additional "Layer" in between. In TM FX you see it nicely as middle row "Software Playback" channels. If you route something in the DAW to e.g. AN1/2 OUT, then audio signal 1st appears in the middle row under SW playback channel 1/2. Now you have the flexibility to route it to any output you like.

Easiest to be performed in TM FX submix mode. You click to an HW output e.g. for phones and then raise the faders of
- HW inputs in top row (= near-zero latency monitoring within recording interface)
- SW Playback channels in middle row (= audio from PC/DAW with the known RTL (round trip latency through USB/FW/...))
to create the individual submix for this HW output.
Each output is compareable to an AUX channel of a mixer and also called submix, hence the name of the mode, submix mode.

The following drawing gives you an overview how nicely you can send different audio streams from PC, Applications, DAW to different outputs to create then the appropriate submix for each of the real output where your devices are connected (monitor, phones, external devices)
https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.ph … 90#p163290

And this is an attempt to show the routing in a graphic how the audio flow / routing is when connecting external devices
https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.ph … 05#p163205

Its no rocket science, give it some time

Maybe this TM FX primer that I wrote is of use for you
https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … rnal-equi/

Very useful also the RME video tutorials
https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … al-Videos/

And do not underestimate the very informative manual, it also has a TM FX section that you should read.

One additional hint: if you use TM FX routing, then it can help you to reset TM FX and use the reset function "straight playback". TM FX: Options -> Reset Mix -> Straight playback, this adds the following routing:
SW Playback AN 1/2 to HW Output AN 1/2
SW Playback AN 3/4 to HW Output AN 3/4
similar to "DAW mode". Some people who are not so familiar with TM FX routing seem to prefer that as it "magically solves" certain understanding problems, because they are new to TotalMix FX.