From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

Audio I/O device setup and preferences - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

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Audio I/O device setup and preferences

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- [Instructor] External audio interfaces allow you to record and monitor audio at a higher quality and resolution than a computer's built in converters are capable of. Let's discuss how to configure Ableton Live to work with an external audio interface, and learn how to activate the interface inputs and outputs. So I've got a default set open, and you can go to Preferences a couple different ways. First of all, on a Mac, you'll find it under the Live menu, and on a PC, you'll find Preferences under the Options menu. You can also open it via key command, which on a Mac would be command comma, or on a PC, control comma. Once Preferences are open, you have several tabs that go down the left hand side. Let's click on the Audio tab. In the Audio Device area, you'll find three important settings. Starting off with the driver type, here at the top. Now for the most part, you're going to use the driver that is built in with your operating system. For example, on a Mac, that would be CoreAudio. If you're on a PC, then you'll likely use the ASIO or ASIO driver. But if your interface requires a third party driver, you'll want to load that first and then open up Ableton. Once you get into Ableton, you can click the drop down menu here next to Driver Type, and you should see it listed here. I'll go ahead and stay with CoreAudio. And then next I'm going to come down and set the input device. Now when you click the drop down menu, you'll see several options, many of which have to do with your operating system like Built-in Line Input or Built-in Digital Input. I also see things like Soundflower here, and that's because I've got an extra piece of software loaded that allows me to channel audio from one application to another application. And because I've got Pro Tools open, I also see the Pro Tools Aggregate I/O. But my interface is a Prism Lyra, so I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and choose that. We can do the same thing for our Audio Output Device. And again we see things like Built-in Output, or you might see Headphone Output, if you're on a laptop. And those again relate to you operating system and the available outputs on your computer. Again, I'm going to go ahead and choose Lyra for my output device. But just note here that you can have different devices being used for input and output. You could use your interface for the input, and you could use your built-in output, if you want, for your output device. Now underneath the Audio Output Device pop-up menu, you'll see two more buttons. One for Input Config and Output Config. These are important because this is where we enable or disable inputs and outputs. So let's click the Input Config button. And my interface has got four inputs and four outputs. That's why we see these two rows. And the inputs can be enabled by clicking on the little button here on the left. If it's gold, it's enabled. If you click it and it's gray, it's disabled. Let me re-enable that, and then in the box to the right of that, we have a new thing that we can do in Ableton Live 10, and that's give our inputs and outputs custom names. So for example I could type something like In 1 and In 2 for mono inputs, and then over here under the stereo side, I could type Ins one slash two. Now go ahead and click OK, and I'll click the Output Config, and I can do something similar there. Now I see additional outputs because I've got some digital outputs on my interface that give me a total of eight outputs. And I've only enabled the four analog outputs. So just so that we can see what it does, I'll go on the stereo output over here for one and two, and I'm going to name that Outs one slash two, and I'll click OK. And if you're done with the Preference window, you can close it by clicking the little red button in the upper left hand corner, or you can simply press the escape key on your computer keyboard. So now we see over here under Master Out, we see the outs one and two, added to the one slash two that would be there in any case. So you can see the custom name. Over here on Audio Four, if I click that you can see all the different options there. Now you see some green in the little meters there next to some of those options because that's the audio from my voiceover mic that you're listening to. Okay, so now that we've learned how to select an audio interface to work with Live, we're almost ready to start working. Check out the next video where we'll take a look at how to set up your midi controllers.

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