Up until now I’ve been using a Focusrite interface for both the regular audio out on my macbook (sound from browser/youtube/etc) and also recording audio in Logic Pro. I just got a CQ-20B and I’d like to replace the focusrite with it, but I cannot get audio over USB working. The device shows up as an audio device, I’ve selected it in System Settings as the audio out, I’ve remapped the inputs on channels 15 and 16 to have the icon for SDHC/USB as the input rather than Analog, I’ve boosted the trim on those channels, it does not detect any sound coming in those channels whatsoever when I’m playing something from my mac.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the USB icon in the top right doesn’t appear to be lit up like the Wifi and Bluetooth icons are:
is that related?
Is there something else I need to turn on?
I do not want to switch it to “Stereo” streaming mode because I still want all the other input channels available to me for recording in LPX.
I’ve had no problems with Logic Pro and the CQ-20B. It’s not plugged in at the moment so I can’t verify the USB indicator’s behaviour, but if you’re still stuck later on I can give it a try.
I presume you’re sending from Logic Pro on the channels you’ve indicated? Since it’s in multichannel mode Logic will see the full set of outputs, and of course it won’t default to using 15/16 for Stereo Out.
I just plugged my CQ-20B in, set USB to multitrack, and connected my MacBook Pro. As you describe, the USB indicator in CQ MixPad remains unlit – but I had no problem getting audio to any channel I desired.
The default for a new Logic Pro project seemed to be to route Stereo Out to Input 17/18 which are assigned to Stereo In 1. Selecting Mix > I/O Assignments from the menu allowed me to remap that at will. Once the CQ-20B had the relevant inputs switched to USB/SD instead of Analogue, signal showed up as expected.
Do you have the audio from your mac itself (not just logic) going through the mixer? That’s the big thing I’m trying to achieve. TBH I hadn’t even tried the specific output of Logic through it, I figured it wouldn’t work because I didn’t have any audio output from anything else on my mac.
I didn’t try that explicitly, and packed my mixer back up after the quick attempt (as this is what I use primarily as a portable recording setup – and we’re between shows at the moment so it’s in storage.)
From memory, I’m pretty sure macOS will use outputs 1-2 for system audio if you choose the mixer as your audio output device in Settings, and you can’t use system volume controls to adjust the volume of the output. I believe these are both the case for anything relying on macOS’ integrated USB audio class driver. Additional control requires a vendor supplied driver which isn’t something Allen & Heath have provided, and I wouldn’t expect them to do so.
(EDIT: Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Audio Hijack is one approach to taking control of system audio routing when you don’t have a dedicated driver. There’s a demo version available to experiment with and find out if it solves any problems you might have with what I wrote above.)
AAH! THANK YOU! So, I made it work using Audio Hijack, which made me realize how to make it work WITHOUT Audio Hijack - I discovered I had to route the audio w/ Audio Hijack to channels 15/16 on the mixer, cause those were the ones I configured for USB input, which made me realize that if I had just used channels 1-2 to start, it would have just worked out of the box. So I tried that, and it did
Thank you!
