Poor man's multitrack

A while ago, I wanted the ability to practice mixing without a band present. Normally you would buy a nice multi-output for your computer (or go digitally, for example with MADI) and connect that to your mixing desk. There are many expensive solutions for this, and I settled for a very cheap one.

Buying two cheap USB 5.1 channel sound devices, I now have 12 outputs (14 including the outputs of my macbook pro). These outputs are minijack, so using minijack to 2x XLR I can connect to the mixing desk.

Very cheap USB 5.1 Audio Devices

Minijack to 2x XLR

Combining the two usb devices in one aggregated device

In Mac OS X, there is a nice feature called aggregate devices (in Audio MIDI setup). An aggregate devices allows you to tie multiple sound devices together. Using this, I create a virtual sound device with 4 inputs and 12 outputs.




Next I installed Ardour and Jackpilot. This open source 'digital audio workstation' allows me to load my tracks and play them to the different outputs I have. With this, I have my poor man's multitrack output for less than 100 euro's. Such a system is unsuitable for real use, but allows me to play around with the IDR32 without a band present.

Jack Pilot

Ardour

The complete setup

It works!