This is great however – you can record 4 channels at a time, and they can all be phantom powered XLR. There are two more inputs on the front for easier, more frequent access, but they share channels with 1 & 2 on the back, so you still can only have 4 inputs streaming at one time. That’s 4 in the back that are balanced / unbalanced TRS 1/4 inchers, and they also double as XLR with phantom power.
#Avid m audio fast track driver software
The mixer software that comes with the C600 is very well thought out, and it includes everything you need, and I haven’t found anything lacking – yet. A lot of the things my mixer used to do for me are now replaced with a piece of software, instead of a physical knob. But it does – and it does a great job of it. It was a bit hard for me to swallow at first – that this thing was going to take over the duties of my gigantic mixer board. It stands roughly 2-3 inches tall at its tallest point. It’s not huge either – it’s about as long across as the average laptop / netbook I’d say, and about half as deep. That’s a huge deal to me – when you’ve got a guitar slung over your shoulder, anything you can do with one hand is a good thing, so you can use your other hand to keep your guitar from swinging around and taking out your computer monitor, or a speaker. This thing sits on your desk like a permanent fixture, you can plug things into it with one hand, and its not constantly sliding around on the desk. I liked the fact that it was shaped like a piece of a workstation – this thing is like a little mini mixer – as opposed to the sometimes hard to deal with small, (physically) unstable USB interfaces. In that way, it’s one of the most useful USB interfaces on the market, and it’s simple enough to sit on your desk next to your mouse. It’s got everything you need, and nothing you don’t. They did a great job at choosing a pragmatic feature set. M-Audio did one important thing really right with the C600.
![avid m audio fast track driver avid m audio fast track driver](https://c1.zzounds.com/media/productmedia/fit,2018by3200/quality,85/FastTrackPro_3qtr-f78670720328b2d8c0ccab4bdfcd40c0.jpg)
I looked at all the USB / Firewire interfaces I could find out there, and settled on the M-Audio (now AVID) Fast track C600 USB interface. Get the old gigantic mixer off my desk, get something with good D/A A/D converters working for me, and something that could streamline my process a little bit. The only benefit was the extremely low latency, and I guess you could say I had lots of options (in the form of knobs on the mixer). It was a 16 channel mixer, and it took a lot of space in my workstation, and I rarely used all of the functionality of this old mixer. Then there was the sheer size of the thing. I had real issues making good mixes with the setup due to this factor. This same mixer actually was used for my amplification as well, so the sound came back out of the sound card, and went right back into that mixer, and then hit my monitors.Īnother reason this was a bad setup was that during mixing and mastering, my sound was colored by the mixer. That’s a lot of room for sound degradation, loss of quality and more chance of noise getting involved with my signal. So there was a lot of room and circuitry between my signal’s origination, and the digital recording on my computer. It worked pretty well but there were a few problems with this setup, many of which should already be obvious to you.įirst, it was just a mixer, and the analog outs to the analog ins on the sound card meant more analog steps between my instrument and the A/D converters. It had analog outs into my multiple analog in sound card. I had a gigantic mixer in my home studio for many years. Read Time 7 Minutes M-Audio Delivers A Monster USB Recording Interface Why I bought the M-Audio C600