Hello, and welcome to the Soundcraft Video Manual Series. Today, we’ll be covering all the basics of how to use your Ui24R mixer with your favorite Digital Audio Workstation, also known as a DAW or D-A-W. We’ll cover how to connect your mixer to the computer for the first time and record some audio from the mixer’s inputs. Although these concepts are intended to focus on recording with a DAW, 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.  Before getting started, make sure that you have downloaded the most recent drivers for the mixer available on Soundcraft.com if you’re using a Windows computer. Links will be in the description below. The Ui24R is Class Compliant, so no drivers are necessary for MacOS.
 Connecting the Mixer to the DAW
. The first thing that we want to do when launching our DAW with the mixer, is visit the DAW’s preferences or audio settings. Here, we will want to find where we select our main audio device. It’s usually located in the main audio or project settings where you can also find the device sample rate.
 In Reaper, this is found under the “Device” section of Reaper’s preferences.
 Select the mixer as your main audio device. If for some reason you cannot locate the mixer in the list of devices, try closing the DAW, power cycling the mixer, and ruling out a faulty USB cable or hub by swapping them around or trying with a different device. You can also confirm that the computer is seeing the mixer by opening Windows’ or Mac’s Sound Settings. In Windows, the mixer should show up like this in the sound settings as an output device, showing each one of our available USB channels. If it doesn’t, try disconnecting the mixer and re-installing the drivers. In Mac, the mixer should show as an audio device in the Sound settings under the System Preferences.
 Recording an Input from the Mixer
. With our mixer connected successfully to our DAW, it’s time to do our first recording. For this example, I have a synthesizer connected to the XLR combo jack number 1 on the front of the Ui24r. First, we should make sure that the signal is getting into the Ui. Let’s play the synth and make sure that we have signal on the gain page. It’s important to remember that the USB will pull the input signal directly from the gain stage, pre dynamics and effects. That means that this gain fader is all we have to control the volume that makes it into our DAW, so make sure that you gain stage appropriately. This means our signal is ideally hitting somewhere at least around -12db. This also means that DSP on the Ui24r such as the compressor and EQ will not be present on the recorded signal. We have a healthy signal here, so let’s look at our DAW. 
Add a new track if you haven’t got one in the default project. In the DAW’s mixer or console view, find where we select the input source for this new track. Here we can see all the mixer’s available inputs. Something to remember with the Ui24R is that inputs 1 through 10 are reserved for our mixer outputs. 1 and 2 are the mix left and right, and 3 through 10 are the auxes 1 through 8. This means our mixer’s physical inputs start on 11, so I need to select 11 for our synth that’s plugged into channel 1. This patching is hard configured into the mixer and cannot be changed. Now when we monitor or record arm this track, we should get signal into our DAW. You can expand on this by doing a multitrack recording by assigning different mixer inputs to different channels and recording everything at once assuming that multitrack is also supported by your DAW. That’s all for now. Check out our next video, where we’ll cover how to listen to your recordings by sending the audio back to your mixer.