hey guys it's Lance at Mac sound solutions and today I'm going to show
you how I was able to record 32 tracks that's right
32 tracks 48k 24 bit through my iPad pro and all I needed was this and of course
an audio interface in my case I have the M 32r are it's my mixing console which I
use for studio and for live mainly for live recording
I don't do live sound I do live remote audio recording so anyway once I got the
iPad Pro I thought it'd be really cool just to check it out and see if it could
handle it and it handled it really well now there's only one app that I found
that can even do this which is called n track n tracks been around for a while
and they're very good about getting in touch with you if you have questions
about the app and they have good support and they're always updating the app so I
tried GarageBand the first time around and I was able to record 32 tracks
although it was a real pain to set up and then secondly GarageBand stops
recording it like 33 minutes or something I forget what it was but it's
it it's really for songwriting so it's not meant to record for a super long
time but you can record a whole song you know 32 tracks into GarageBand just
can't have it be longer than a certain amount of time and GarageBand only has a
bars and beats counter it does not show you a time counter n track has unlimited
tracks goes up to a sample rate of 192 if your interface will do that of course
I don't know if you can record 32 tracks at 192 but anyway I digress I was
recording at 48k 24 bit was able to record 32 tracks for 2 hours I'm gonna
now show you how to set up the app to do this and the app is $30 if you buy it or
$2 a month to rent so I did the rental just to check it out to see if it would
work and I do plan on buying it because the support of the app seems very good
and I think they're gonna improve it on the next release as well because getting
audio files off the iPad which I'll talk about later in the video is not that
simple it could be a lot easier but you can do it and then you can open your
tracks and Pro Tools or end track also makes their own desktop version of the
DA so you can open in that in fact you have to have that to be able to unpack
your recording if that's all you want to know that you can record 32 tracks to
your iPad then you can stop the video here I don't want to waste your time but
if you want to see how it's done how to set the app up I'm gonna go through all
the steps and it's a little lengthy and it's not too exciting but if you have in
track and you want to know how to multitrack to your iPad stay tuned okay
so here's the setup it's very simple I'm using the Midas M 32 R with DN 32 USB
card which is only USB 2 and I'm using the cable to the right of the console
which is a USB a 2 USB B cable essentially just a USB 2 printer cable
so basically I'm using that cable to go from the board to the Apple USB C 2 USB
a adapter and then into the iPad but you could use the other cable that I have on
there which is USB C 2 USB B and you wouldn't need a dongle you could just go
from the console right into the iPad the reason I have the dongle is so I can
copy things on and off the iPad connected to USB 3 hard drives and other
media ok so first step is to hop over to the App Store and download in track
studio now you can try it out but I think it only lets you record 8 tracks
if you want to record the full 32 you either have to rent the app or buy the
app the app is 30 bucks it's not that cheap but you can rent it for two
dollars a month so that's what I did just to test it out okay so I launched
the app on the iPad we're looking at the iPad screen here I deleted that first
track because I want to start with a clean slate now
we go into the settings and we want to select the DN 32 USB or whatever your
interface is and usually when you plug it in it automatically selects it but
you have to go to the inputs and then set the inputs to be 32 channels for
some reason the app starts with 4 channels ok so now I'm going to go to
the outputs tab and instead of having all 32 channels coming back I'm just
gonna have stereo output 1 and 2 coming back from the app but if you prefer you
can have all the outputs coming back into the console and that's cool for
people who want to do virtual sound checks via their iPad so now we're gonna
go in and set up our sample rate which you can see goes all the way up to 192
but I'm using 48 K okay now we're gonna move down to the buffer size which I'm
gonna set to 512 10 milliseconds because when you run at a low buffer like 64 1.3
milliseconds you most likely will run into it popping out of record or
glitching I haven't tried it yet with this app but say you're using Pro Tools
or another DAW to lower the latency the more risk you run at getting an error
and it popping out a record so a higher buffer is the way to go when you're
recording a live show and this is what I used on my first test to record for two
hours and it did it without a problem so now we're gonna go over and set the bit
resolution I usually record a 24-bit okay so the last 2 settings is
background audio and the 64 bit audio engine you definitely want to have
background audio on because that means if you switch to a different app it's
gonna keep recording if that's not turned on and you switch out of the app
boom it's going to stop your record and the 64 bit audio engine that's really
for the mix engine so you don't need that turned on but during my test I left
it on anyway so now you want to hit the apply
I button in the upper right hand corner there so it restarts the audio engine
and remembers all the settings that you have done now you want to add 32 tracks
by going down on the right-hand side of the app there and that's the little add
audio track where you see me clicking and I'm gonna add 32 audio tracks okay
so we're gonna look at the mixer view for a second here and we're gonna see
that I've got all 32 tracks ready to go so now I'm gonna armed the tracks and by
doing this you basically click on the input you want you see where it says D
and 32 USB one left and one two right so you go up click on the little box select
your inputs the way the software is it records in stereo pairs so the tracks
are stereo or mono but you have to decide that and obviously you're only
gonna get 16 stereo pairs and you get 32 mono tracks so I am doing it in mono
where I just select the left and then the right channel for each track moving
through the inputs and eventually I will get to all 32 and they'll all be ready
to be in record there is a setting in the preferences where it allows you to
arm a track once you pick an input so that's kind of handy you don't have to
go click the record button after you've picked the input and the other thing you
should do is save your session at this point so let's jump forward now that
we've selected all our inputs okay so now we're gonna hit the record button
and off we go recording 32 tracks 48k 24 bit on an
iPad Pro which I'd say is pretty darn impressive not to mention that the iPad
pro is doing a screen capture of this whole sequence at the same time I'm
recording the audio so that's even more impressive the app just kept
on working now I'm minimizing the track view so that you can see that all 32
tracks are on screen at the same time so you can pop back and forth between your
timeline and your mixer move faders around pan things you know the usual but
if you're just doing it for recording you don't really want to mess with
anything you just want to let it record the other thing is that in the upper on
the on track number one there you see a little speaker button and when it's
turned on it turns yellow so this is your input monitoring so you can hear
the signal coming through also if you don't have that selected
you're not going to see the meters moving so basically you need to have
those selected aside from the record track you need to have the input button
selected also all the way down the line all 32 tracks so you see your levels
coming into the da okay so now that we've recorded all our 32 tracks we want
to save our session and if you saved it earlier you should save it again to make
sure that it saves their recording so we're gonna say yes overwrite and we've
saved our session now we want to save it again in a different format called dot
swg and you see in the drop down menu it's the second from the bottom that is
going to take all your audio files and the song and put it in one compressed
package keep in mind if you have a very long recording like I did with two hours
it's not gonna flip around to the mixer right after you hit save it's gonna take
a while and at first I'm like well what's happening I didn't see any you
know any indication that it was saving but just be patient and eventually the
app will switch from the save menu back to the mixer and that's when you know
you've saved your dot sgw file so now that the dot sgw file is completed
saving we're gonna go open it so we go to the open menu again
and we hit open and now we're gonna highlight the 32 track recording dot sgw
and then hit the info button on the far right that will then open up the menu to
save two files then we click on saved files a new menu opens up and you have
the choice of saving to your iCloud drive or on my iPad
now if it's a small session like maybe five gigs you could save it to your
iCloud drive but then you're having to upload the file and download the file
onto your computer so I am for especially for larger based sessions I'm
gonna save it to on my iPad and these are all your app folders that allow you
to share files and get them off your iPad so you select the N track folder
and hit the Save button then wait for the app to flip back to the mixer view
and you know you've saved your file and the reality is it'd be so much better if
the app would just say if the dot sgw file to the end track file sharing
folder in the first place unfortunately it doesn't do that now but hopefully it
will with the future update but really the best scenario would be for you to
just be able to export all the wav files in one shot without even having to make
a dot sgw just export waves from a song session so now to get the file off the
iPad you're gonna plug it into your computer and if you're using Catalina
it's gonna mount like a harddrive and you're gonna go to files the files tab
then go down and find n track find your dot sgw file and drag it off to the hard
drive if you want to copy it to but now you have the problem of what the heck is
a dot sgw file n track studio for the desktop is the only software I know of
that will open this file so now I'm on my Mac Pro's desktop I'm launching in
tracked studio which is still the demo and just showing you there there's the
sgw file I copied to my desktop now I'm going to go open it
selected open and boom there's the folder with all my wav files in it so at
this point you can bring those WAV files into whatever DAW you prefer to work
with Pro Tools logic and track the Dove your choice now if you don't want to use
the dot sgw file you can export your wav files one at a time by going to import
audio you'll see all of the for your recorded WAV files and if you hit the
little info button on the far right of the wav file you can then send that file
directly to your files folder on your iPad and the problem is you'd have to do
it 32 times if you only recorded one pass and it's a viable way to go if you
recorded 8 tracks and you want to get them off really quickly so when I switch
to the files app on the iPad you can see some of the tracks that I exported with
this method but the reality is if you recorded a lot of tracks in several
passes you would definitely want to stick with the dot sgw method hopefully
they'll just add a way to export all of your WAV files from a song in one shot
to your files folder on your iPad ok so to wrap it up I just like to give thumbs
up to the end track team they're based in Italy in Rome and they're very good
with their tech support they got back to me on a few emails right away and they
also respond to people who leave reviews so it's very cool that they get back to
you it seems like a small company that's doing a great job and they say they're
going to update the app and have some major releases coming this year to
improve some of the features but anyway that's the end of the video please give
me the thumbs up or the thumbs down and subscribe to my channel and we'll see
you on the next Macs sound solutions video