Sunday, October 23, 2011

Tascam US-800 and Cubase LE 5 on Mac OS X: No recorded sound?

So a couple nights ago I tried to use my new Tascam US-800 to record alongside a Tascam 2488.  Would have been great to get the MIDI control from the the 2488 to help sync up the recordings and get some good audio across both.  I installed Cubase LE since GarageBand doesn't seem to support MIDI control for transport control.  Too bad I couldn't get any audio to record.

I followed the QuickStart guide:

  1. Go to Devices > Device Setup...
  2. Under "VST Audio System" make sure the US-800 is selected as the ASIO Driver.  You can also select the US-800 in the left panel and make sure all the ports are listed as you want them.  Note that Ports 7-8 are the digital input ports for the SPDIF in jack on the back of the US-800.
  3. Then go to Devices > VST Connections (F4) and make sure that on the Inputs tab you have a mono bus for every channel you want to record (unless you have some stereo recording going on) and that you assign a "Device Port" from the US-800 to the Bus.  You can also set a nice name for the Bus like "Mono 1".
  4. Create or select an Audio track.  Clicking on the track will yield the "Inspector" which includes two lines, one for input source and output destination.  Both of these refer to busses setup in the VST Connections screen.
  5. Arm the track for recording or monitoring with the buttons on the Track.
Too bad that didn't give me any audio!  The short of the story is go download the CoreAudio2ASIO update from Cubase's website:

Also, if you haven't already, go download the updated Control Panel from Tascam: