Hello, and welcome to the Soundcraft Video Manual Series. Today, we’ll be continuing to setup our DAW to work with the Ui24 by getting audio to play back through our mixer. Since the mixer is acting as our audio interface, we want to be able to hear our mixes through headphones or monitors connected to the mixer. Remember, these concepts are intended to focus on recording with a DAW, but some of these concepts could also be applied to other streaming or broadcasting software, like OBS or Zoom. I’ll be using Ableton today, but everything we’ll talk about can be translated to most DAWs available on the market.  Let’s get started.
Ui Patching
If you haven’t set up your mixer to be your main audio interface yet, check out our first video to get the mixer connected and some audio recorded in. Here I have some synth audio that I recorded previously, but now I want to hear back what I’ve recorded. The first thing that needs to be done is some patching on our mixer. Head on over to the mixer settings, and then the select the patching tab. We’re going to be routing our DAW audio back into two channels of our mixer so that we have meter feedback on our mixer as well as the ability to control playback volume with the faders. 
Select the USB-DAW option on the top of the patching grid. Keep in mind that these channels only relate to returning audio from the computer or DAW, and this patching does not affect mixer inputs that we are sending to the DAW for recording. The channel numbers that we select to return on are arbitrary and you could pick any two blue numbers here, but I like to return on DAW 31 and 32 to leave my first DAW channels available for multitrack playback, which we’ll cover in the next video. Out of the box, we have 4 unused channels on the Ui24, and that’s 21 through 24. I’m just going to return my DAW to 23 and 24. Tap in the box to make the patch from DAW 31 to channel 23 and DAW 32 to 24. Head over to your mix view and scroll to these channels. You’ll see they now have labels of DAW 31 and 32. Go ahead and link them by long pressing on channel 23’s label, then selecting “stereo link”. Now that we’re patched, let’s head back to our DAW.
DAW Setup
We’re going to be setting up our DAW’s main audio output to come to our mixer, specifically the mixer channels 23 and 24 where we just set our patching.
 In Ableton, you can do this from the arrangement or session view. Select the channel dropdown under the external output option on your master channel. You’ll notice that this defaults to 1 and 2. Select channels 31 and 32, because this is the blue DAW channel numbers we selected earlier. If you don’t see the DAW channels you selected, make sure those channels are enabled under the output config of the main audio settings found in Ableton’s preferences.
Press play and the main audio output should now be returning to the mixer’s channels 23 and 24. This means we have fader control now of our DAW return audio, as well as access to the mixer’s DSP on these channels if you need additional tuning. Audio being returned to the mixer like this can also be incorporated into in-ear mixes for backing or click tracks. That’s all for now. In the next video, we’ll be expanding on this concept to bring a multi-track recording session back into the mixer.