 Hello and welcome to the live stream today we are talking about stream deck and loop deck and there's been a few updates to both of them come out in the past few few days so I thought it'd be a good time to just sort of go and have a little look at what the updates are and how this is changed in the way that they kind of stack up against one another because they are obviously very similar devices and there's a lot in common with them but there are also some significant differences when it comes to the apps so more of that in a little while so first of all I just want to say welcome to our new channel members and there are already some lovely people in the Discord back channel so if you are interested in becoming a channel member and joining the backstage area you can do that just down below but we've got Peter and welcome to also David Hunt, Eileen Smith, Paul Duncan and Pierre if you're going to get the name wrong you'll have to excuse me Pierre, Van Obergun, Obergen but welcome and thank you for joining and certainly if you haven't already then get into the Discord and I'll open up the members area and the backstage area for all of you over there so let's start by just having a little look shall we at the different models that there are of both stream deck and loop deck so a lot of the people in the chat here are very familiar with both of these devices but for the sake of people who may be watching this on the replay trying to decide which one is right for you let's have a little look at the different devices so first of all we've got if I come down here we've got there we go that's the wrong screen there we go these are the stream deck devices the basic difference between them is essentially just the number of buttons that you've got so there is the OG, the stream deck but then they came out with the stream deck XL and the stream deck mini the stream deck has 15 keys the XL has 32 and the mini has 6 now the stream deck mark 2 came out just last year and that basically brought the 15 key in line with the XL and the mini in terms of the more like the form factor really so if we just have a little look at the OG one that had a basically a small plastic kickstand on the back but the mark 2 basically now has a very similar form factor to the XL and the mini one thing that was added that was extra in the stream deck mark 2 though was these interchangeable faces so you can now add a little bit more customization to it here is the stream deck XL this is the one that I use if you want a recommendation from me if you're going to go with a stream deck which size to get if you think that you can manage with 6 keys you may be right but once you get it whatever use case you think you've got for it it'll end up becoming so much more I bought the stream deck for basically live streaming controlling ECAM live but then I quickly realized that it was just such an amazing productivity tool that I use it for really every area of my workflows these days in everything that I'm doing so if you can go for it I would recommend the XL being the better one to go for there but I'll leave that for you to decide there is also the stream deck pedal which I also do use as well this is obviously for the feet and this is another thing that I was using a different pedal before but then when this came out I just jumped straight over to it because it's so easy to just add in all of the actions that you would have on the stream deck on your desk on your feet and believe it or not that is an amazing productivity tool to be able to do things with both hands and feet at the same time so let's have a look at the loop deck though and this is something that's quite different really with the loop deck is there's not just one device and it's not just a case of having extra buttons they are all quite different and so we have got the original loop deck which really came from the sort of Adobe suite of applications and video editing photo editing so it's more a sort of creative tool for those kind of applications and that is its sort of heritage whereas the stream deck was built by streamers for streamers the loop deck was created by really more creatives that are you know as I say controlling things in those sort of creative applications and so that sort of shows in this original one where all the buttons are labeled they've got all of these different things that they can control so it's all related to photo editing video editing and things like that now then they came out after I suppose seeing the success of the stream deck with an evolution of that which was a big departure but it's just crucial to understand the heritage of this that it was originally from the creative side rather than the live streaming side and that explains some of the potential flaws that there is in the software which I'll come to a little bit later so the loop deck live then is this device this is the one that I currently use I actually use both of them together I'll just quickly show you my setup so I've got the stream deck XL and then the loop deck live so just coming back because it's easy to see on that particular image there where is it here we go not that one too many buttons this one here so this has got rather than physical buttons on like we've got on the stream deck we've got a touch screen and then on the touch screen you've got various different buttons you can still swipe through and have multiple different pages of buttons you can do that on the stream deck as well but the thing that is really different about this is we also have some physical buttons down at the bottom and then also these dials here on the side and they allowed you to make adjustments to various different things depending on the plug in you're using I use those for adjusting volume levels on e-cam live for example you can use them in creative applications like photoshop or the adobe suite for zooming in all those sorts of things changing brush sizes and so on so once again it comes back to the thought process that they've had with the design of this is more for these sort of creative apps the next device that they've got though is basically a loop deck live but with this extra part on the bottom so you can see here that we've got the screen we've got the dials down the side and that's exactly the same as the loop deck live but we've basically just then got this extra large wheel at the bottom some more buttons down this side and this side these aren't programmable in terms of they don't have a screen on that you can change the icons or anything like that they are sort of fixed although actually all of these buttons you can change the use if you want but just not the labels in this case so those are the three loop deck devices so as you can see they're not just a case of you know adding extra more of the same kinds of buttons they are actually adding extra sort of functionality different kinds of ways to interact with the device there is also a new device that has been released that's not on their main website but it's on indiegogo and this one is called the loop deck live s and this is basically more aimed at live streamers and what they've done is they've increased the number of buttons so you now have 15 touch buttons whereas the loop deck live has 12 but then they've reduced the number of dials that you've got on it so there's only two now and then those physical buttons they've now got four of those on either side so it's a smaller device but with more touch buttons that you can access at any one time so it's really more like the stream deck regular version the mark 2 or the regular og stream deck but just with these extra buttons and dials on the side so those are the different devices as you can see they're very sort of very different with different functionality but as I say it is the software really that is going to be the key feature here that is going to make or break these devices and unfortunately I've got to say I've never been a fan of the loop deck software in fact it's quite telling that when I bought my loop deck it sat kind of pretty much unused for about three months because I just really couldn't get into the software they have made some improvements to it though and there's been new updates out in the past couple of weeks as I said for both stream deck and for loop deck as well so I thought it would be useful to just go and have a look at the differences between the software for both of them so that we can see how they compare and what these little sticking points are that I'm talking about just a quick hello to Michael in the chat that's right if you need to get the 6, get the 15 if you need to get the 15 and XL you probably need 30 buttons by 2 that is a very good idea actually I'll be getting another stream deck XL and you can actually control one from the other as well so you can have multiple different profiles on each device but then you can use one to switch profiles on the other so that's something that I'll be digging into a little bit more as well but yeah you can never have too many buttons that's probably a lie but let's have a little look who else we've got in here Mr Moderator hello 32 all the way for you of course and let's have a look yeah well this is to write two arrows films the new update is still not great even after the improvements now it's they've still got a long way to go I did a video all about the update and the improvements and I did get all excited when they said that they were updating the UI but then my heart sank a little bit when I went and saw that it wasn't really that much different there is a few things that they've done though to make it a bit easier but perhaps rather than waffling on about it I should actually just show you exactly what the difference between them is so here is the loop deck software we can see a picture of the device and then we have the space here to drag and drop the different actions let me just come to a blank page if I can do that there we go so you've got actions over on this panel hit over here over on the right hand side and you can drag and drop them onto the area and then if you come over and have a look at the stream deck it's very similar we've got the device sort of represented here by all of these buttons and then we've got a series of actions over here and we can just drag and drop them onto the device so you would think really that those are pretty similar interfaces aren't they so how could they be so different when the basic concept of them is the same so let me just have a little look at this comment just quickly how you've got both Mac and PC are there any benefits of one over the other based on computer type my answer to that would be quite on perhaps a little bit negative but no I think the loop deck interface is bad on both the Mac and the PC but we'll have a little look at that what is the problem that I've got though with the loop deck interface let's have a little look shall we at the issue that I see with this so my main problem that I've got with this whilst you do have different actions that you can drag onto the device so we've got a load of actions here in the if I go into the look at this it's actually frozen on me now that's always great that's a demo isn't it oh no there we go it's back now it's acting very very slowly on me now I think it's been hurt I've offended it I've offended the loop deck software so we've got lists of different actions in here one thing that I always find is a bit confusing and overly complicated about this is whereas in stream deck if I just come over to stream deck for a moment let's just say I'm going to just delete this action from here just delete that from there and then let's say I'm going to add an action from here and I'll pick one that is something going to be similar to on the other one so if I wanted to come in here and say we just want to do a keyboard shortcut so a hotkey so I can drag this in here and so you've got one action which is for hotkey and then you come down here and you say I want to click to assign a hotkey and because Keely's here I'm going to use command K so that is the we've just now assigned that hotkey in there if I go over to the loop deck to do the same thing this is one thing that they have improved however the previous way to do this was that you would go into the OS which is to do with the system I guess and then you would come down here to where it says keyboard and then you would go and find the K key and they're in alphabetical order which doesn't really make sense you've got all of these different potential actions they've literally listed out every single key which I think makes it very bloated and confusing you can search but if I search for the letter K to find that key unfortunately everything begins with the word key so it actually very helpfully finds every single action in here so I do indeed have to keep on scrolling to find where it is K over here click on that one and then it brings it up down here so then we can assign that to this particular action there is now an easy way to do this so this is a big improvement basically now in the custom actions here you can create a custom action everything is suddenly behaving very slowly let me just see why this might be let me just try something a second there's something definitely slowing everything up at the moment just not quite sure where that is let me just close down some of this stuff there we go I'll give that another go I don't know if it's just the loop deck software that is doing this in fact let me try tell you what let me try just rebooting the loop deck software that doesn't normally happen to be fair and this wasn't planned let me just close loop deck and reopen it and see if that helps it does actually normally work pretty flawlessly it's just a mess when it's working so that's not seem okay yeah the stream is okay PR it's just that my loop deck software just seem to grind to a halt then so that's the issue that I was having I wonder if there's something to do with that right let me come back in here this should be a little bit better now so what they've got now though is no it's rebooting again there we go so what they've got now is in this custom shortcuts section here they have now made a really simple way to get to all of these things that we're likely to want to use in the loop deck such as creating a keyboard shortcut accessing a web page playing a sound effect basically populating a text string so you know creating a bit like text expander or like you can do with text snippets in stream deck as well so there you can create a long text snippet and then assign that to a key they've got the macros and dial adjustment so that's stuff that we had before where basically you can build chains of events up a bit like multi actions in stream deck so that's what a macro is and the dial adjustments are things that you can add to the dials and run this is a good one to have that wasn't there for quite some time or at least it was a bit tricky to find to basically just open an application so we've now got that run command so as well as having them in here though what they have done that makes this a lot easier to use than it was before this update is you can click on the plus symbol and then you can just easily get to them so if you do want to create a keyboard shortcut you can just click on any button and then you just click on shortcut and then it will open up the panel down here so you can type in whatever shortcut you want you can add the modifier so let me put to command and then take this one off like that so that is how we would create that same shortcut as we had before click on create it adds it into the button and obviously you can add the icon and then also it creates it adds it into your list of custom shortcuts so for every single one of these shortcuts you create it does actually create a custom shortcut for you down there you would then have to go in and add your icons I feel like that is a lot easier than it used to be it felt like you had to go through a few steps before to add the icon whereas now when you just click on a specific button then you will see the icon is just down here as well so they've certainly made it better than it was before but the biggest thing with this that is just a sticking point that I can't get past is they've got profiles which are the same as you've got on the stream deck you can have multiple different profiles on the stream deck and in here they very kindly created all these different profiles for things like After Effects, Audition, Illustrator Final Cut Pro and so on all the Adobe creative suite and you can see here we're getting back to this thing of its heritage for these creative apps but the problem is although there are technically plugins for all of these things if I go to the Adobe Photoshop for example if I change to the Adobe Photoshop profile we've got the Adobe Photoshop plugin over here on the right hand side so that you can click here and get to all of these great little controls that you've got so controlling every possible thing you'd want in Photoshop however if I want to create my own profile for that those are nowhere to be found they're only available within this profile that they've created for you now what they're thinking is that you're going to be using what they call dynamic mode which is whereby as you switch between different apps then it's going to switch profiles on your device but I don't really want to use it like that I want to be able to create my own profile maybe have some controls for one app and some controls for another so you still have to actually go through and create all of these things then manually so whilst we do have as I say really extensive plugins for Photoshop for Audition and all these other creative apps and indeed other apps that you can download from their store they kind of feel a little bit sandboxed so you can't actually just easily copy these between one profile and another they've also sort of added a little bit of complexity as well because as well as having profiles they also do have workspaces within each profile so if I come to something like Audition for example and I switch to the Audition profile and we've got one page there but then within Audition we've also got the editing workspace which feels just like another profile it's the Adobe Audition editing profile here we've got 10 pages of actions and then we've got another profile here or another workspace I should say so it just seems to add an extra layer of complexity to the extra layer of complexity to this let me just come out of here this is acting a little bit weird with me but yeah the problem is if I come and create my own profile and then I want to access all of those controls which they've obviously programmed you know to all of these great shortcuts for Photoshop and the like there's no way to actually add that plugin in here and if I click on the little dots here to edit which of these plugins I want to have shown you can see that I can decide to show some of the basic built-in ones but I can't still access all of those you know those creative suite plugins that we've got whereas compare this to something like the stream deck if I come over to my stream deck for a second here and it's the same sort of thing but you can see I can just access all of the different plugins at once I can come into the little thing here to arrange them I can rearrange them I can choose the ones that I want to show the ones that I don't want to show if I want to add more of the plugins to this list I can just come over to the stream deck store whoops Daisy pressed the wrong one this one up here click in here and then from here I can access all of the different plugins there's a trip mode maybe just blocking this note isn't there it is so here we can get to all of the different plugins when it stops thinking about it something going on here slowing my computer down but we can access all of the plugins from here and then we can just install or uninstall them from here as well I think probably trip mode is blocking that or something but whereas in the loop deck if I just come back to the loop deck here you can see that if I close this one down you can access different plugins from the store in here as well so we've got a marketplace but the trouble with the marketplace is if you install them let me just see I wonder if my trip mode is actually blocking a lot of things here let me just turn it off that might help there we go see if this makes things any better let me try this there we go so here we can access different plugins for the device and we can install those it's a bit more of a tricky process to install them but even once you have installed them if I come up to this area here click on these settings you can see that it's telling me that I do have these different plugins for Ableton Live, After Effects, Audition, Ecamm Live and so on all available and ready however there's no way to actually add them in to access them from my personal profile so that is the main issue that I've got with this is that they've got all of these plugins but you can't actually just access them anywhere and aside from the other obvious issues with that as well. Stream Deck on the other hand is just so much easier to manipulate, move stuff around and sort of do the whole dragging and dropping and you're good to go so I will just mention a couple of other things that they updated in the loop deck though there's a few things for the Windows only so since somebody did ask specifically about Windows there was a couple of improvements apparently to the sound custom action I'm not sure what that was and the new application custom action so new open application so I was pleased to see that although in the release notes they say that's Windows only only we do have this option now to easily just run an application from here so you can open up an application and the other thing that they did was they allow you to change the colour of this so that's something I suppose so you can change the lights on these buttons but apart from that it still got quite a long way to go. I'll be interested to see when the next iteration of this comes out and what they plan to do with it like I say I was a bit disappointed that they hadn't gone a little bit further I feel like really they could have probably held off this until they'd done something a little bit better and certainly now that we have got access to all of these different buttons here it does just seem a complete waste of space to have each individual keystroke for example listed down here and just adds makes it a little bit harder to find the things that you would actually want in here so in terms of the stream deck though the update that came out probably just was it just over a week ago something like that I forget exactly now but the big thing on that was actually again something to do with something that I don't use which was OBS so the OBS Studio plugin had a big update and there was some extra things that were added into that but the other thing that they added in was the ability to actually change the orientation of it as well so if you want your stream deck over to one side you can now do that in the settings and we've now got this thing in here device orientation so you can basically rotate the icons by 90 degrees 180 or 270 so if you want it just sort of in landscape mode instead or in portrait mode instead of landscape then you can now do that by the way when you do check for the update come in here and just click on check for updates if you have just updated to 5.3 then come back again because there's also a firmware update button that appears just down at the bottom here so where it says the firmware version there's no check for update but if there is an update available it will appear there so when you update the software to 5.3 if you haven't already then come back into the settings immediately after you've updated because you'll find that there is then a firmware update depending presumably on the device that you've got there has been another update since then 5.3 so there's now 5.3.1 which came out a couple of days ago no real new features or anything like that guessing that was just a few sort of stability improvements that have happened since that first 5.3 update came out so in summary then in terms of the differences between them which one of these would I recommend you can probably tell where I'm going with this if you're using the creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and all these sorts of things there is some benefit to using the loop deck because you do have these extra dials that you can adjust things with the way that I use these is I use them with Ecamm Live so it's tended to be that my use cases like this I have got my stream deck which I use for absolutely everything this one I never change the profile and never change the screen I only use this for my basically controlling the levels in Ecamm Live and then also I've got some additional scenes in Ecamm Live that I use for my live streams and things like that so that pretty much just stays as it is and I do also use the dials for some of the stuff some of the things I do in Photoshop but I still have all of the main controls for Photoshop are all on the stream deck they do work really well together I would love if these these dials if stream deck just added a few on although I guess that's kind of what they are trying to do with this new loop deck device if I come back to it where has it gone I think I've just closed it down but the loop deck Live S is basically a 15 key stream deck with those extra little dials on it by the way the way that I've mounted these this is just a like an iPad or tablet stand and then I've got the stream deck just sort of sitting on the bottom so it just keeps them nicely together there is another device though that you can get which is from Etsy thanks to India Delgado for pointing this one out if I just come over here there's a guy that's making these 3D printed stands that basically are a mount for the loop deck and the stream deck together the loop deck the stream deck fits using the magnets that are built into it and then this one has just got a sort of housing that it pops into so if you are using the two together that is a really nice little device to hold the two together but this is what I'm using anyway it is as I say pretty pretty sturdy and they just sit there quite nicely on the table let me just have a quick check in with the chat because it's getting away from me a little bit so it's frozen on you during some edits is that the the loop deck you're talking about so I've had issues with it I had some issues with it linking with Ecamm just the past couple of weeks I had a thing come up saying there was some issue with the plugin although you know the device or the plugin hadn't changed so I'm not quite sure why that was but anyway that seems to have been fixed with this update and hello by the way first time in the stream so thank you very much great to see you here and also for Kevin you'll stick with your stream deck I don't blame you and Evil Dave of Canada hello there great to see you here and you've got the stream deck excel as well it's the way to go really isn't it Glenda still trying to get your stream deck set up correctly I always make everything look so easy well the reason for that Glenda is because what I don't do is I don't come and live stream or make videos when I'm still figuring it out so I make it look easy because I make the video once I've done it if you saw me for most of the time I'll probably have a face more like this scratching my head so I do get puzzled by stuff just like everyone let's have a little look hello Mr Tom book I swear I spent months trying to use the loop deck but couldn't vibe with it just couldn't do it that is so common Tom and that is why it sat on my desk for three months I bought it all excited I got it out of the box like a little kid on Christmas you know a new tech device to play with I plugged it in started getting into it and thought oh I'll have to come back to this and then I just kept putting it off and then I eventually got into it when was it it was there was an update to Ecamm or something like that where it made it a bit more sense to me and then all I've done is basically used it for for Ecamm so yeah it's got such a long way to go with the software which is a shame because I love the form factor of it I love the size of it I have used it with the Ecamm as well when I've been just wanted something to put in a bag that I'm going to go it's a lot more portable so you know from a hotel or something like that the the form factor of I mean that actually looks bulkier than it is because I've got this frame holding it in place but it's a fraction of the size of the stream deck so I have used it as a sort of portable Ecamm controller as well but yeah it's such a shame it's such a great form factor but yeah just pity when the software lets things down like that I'm glad I didn't finish my beginners guide so I did start a beginners guide to loop deck and I got two videos in and I actually posted them and uploaded them but they weren't quite live then they updated the software to 5.0 or 5.1 or whatever it was so I thought I'll go remake the videos I remade them and then I still have another three to make for the this series of five the beginners guide and now there's this update which changes all that as well so I don't know whether to do another beginners guide or whether to wait until they've just actually fixed it I might end up doing that yeah you've got to have the beep ready there Paul with the loop deck too let's have a look there we are here oh that one yeah don't let all that yeah that is so Paul is referring to there sorry that is the price there by the way that is in Thai Bart so what's that that's about $50 just to put things into context where I was showing that particular thing there so that is the price in Thai Bart and there is about 36 Thai Bart to the dollar now so that is what that is there there we are Mike I know you're waiting for the rest of the series I've I've got it on my list and then all the stuff we I was all prepped to be honest to do the rest of the stream deck series and then they release this update and then I'm thinking do I carry on and do it or do I just wait till they've fixed it all together but I'll probably have to go and remake those first two as well again slightly out of date now I haven't seen that one I'll have to go back and watch the replay I never get to see the couples table live because it's sort of outside of my because of the time zones I never seem to be up then but I'll have to go and watch the replay of that one I'm intrigued now and yeah stream deck XL not a question definitely definitely the way to go there the thing about the stream deck the loop deck so as I was saying the loop deck it has got some benefits if you are using it for those creative things then having the dials seems to be quite useful but the problem I've got with it is I can just never recommend it I could recommend the stream deck to anybody no matter what level of expertise they were I'd recommend it to any friend, family member, colleague or anything like that the loop deck live I just still cannot bring myself to actually recommend it to anyone because it's just a pain to actually program so I'm still using mine I'm still clinging on to it because I've got I believe that one day they'll fix the software but for the time being it's just really not for me and it seems that that is the way for everybody in the in the chat as well I don't know if any of my backstage past members in the discord I've got any comments or anything that they would like to add to the conversation or that share any of their experiences if you do feel free to jump in if not then no problem as well somebody once said if you haven't gotten anything nice to say don't say anything at all didn't they so I quite understand if you don't want to talk about loop deck let me just that's a no from Keely nothing good to say about the loop deck cool so yeah that is really the comparison that wanted to do I think this is going to be a bit of a short stream this is because that's all there is to say about it basically if you're thinking about loop deck or stream deck and you don't need those pretty little dials then stream deck all the way I would just mention there's another device which is one of these ones that's still on my wishlist but I'm quite pulled to trigger with it I think the thing that and that is the monogram let me just get this up this is probably a sort of modular device monogram.com no that isn't oven I'll just show you this it's quite a nice looking oven so I just went to monogram.com this is probably a better alternative to loop deck though actually if you I can highly recommend that oh hello Glenda thank you very much for becoming a channel member that's great to I always appreciate your kind words and your support you've given me throughout my journey so great to have you here welcome to their membership so yes this is a much better purchase than the loop deck live it looks like a very nice oven let me try and find the monogram that I was actually looking for though monogram creative console that's the one that I'm looking from so this is a really intriguing device and we don't get 25% off your first order by entering your email these people do seem to have 25% off discounts seemingly every week I'm getting an email from them every every couple of weeks at least saying they've got this new offer on but this is what it is it's quite intriguing because it's basically all of these different components here you've got this central thing that you need to have this is kind of like the core of it if you like but then we've got a rotary dial here we've got these little blocks of three different dials and then you've got sliders as well so you could use those for like audio levels or things like that the thing that I like about this is it is sort of fully customizable yes I understand you're going to take my data but this is the whole point about it is it is a little bit of a preview whatever it is you're doing the slight reservation I've had with this is basically the compatibility and how many different plugins or things like that will it work with all of the apps I know some people who have used these and they've said that that is something that has been letting it down just because there isn't quite the same ecosystem that is really one of the great things about Stream Deck is that there are lots of plugins for it that cover lots of different applications but then it is all sort of fully customizable right there with this one the monogram but I do like the idea of this you know you can just build basically whatever sort of system you want for however you're going to do it so there's like basically this one the core module you need to have one of those but then there are these ones with they call it an orbiter so you know doing things where you're adjusting levels or maybe a scrub wheel in video editing or something like that I can see that this is pretty cool device I like the design of it the form factor of it but yeah just a little bit concerned about overall compatibility and what applications it will support but we'll see it does look pretty though doesn't it you've got to admit so yeah I've not got much more to say about the loop deck I'm still just hanging out I might well get round to making the rest of the series I will have to remake it now I think Mike with this new update but yeah who knows how long it's going to be before the next update comes out let me just have a look where I'm up to just teasing Adam Oh thanks for posting the link Paul to that stand I've left the link by the way to everything that I've talked about here in the description except the monogram I'll have to drop that one in so what's that is that the oh that's the that's presumably the oven is it so am I going to reduce just refer to myself in the third person there didn't I am I going to release another video with the RCP new beta 1.0.6 I will be doing that probably I don't know if it will be later today it might be tomorrow but I have obviously installed it and so definitely will be doing that it has got a few new features let's just have a little look at that since you asked the question there we go so these are the new features I do actually really like this the pressing the rotary encoder wheel will cycle through and monitor the outputs so this is something that I felt like wasn't necessary before actually so let me just switch to this one so basically if I can move my stream deck and loop deck out of the way get my broadcast in shot here we go I'll just sort this out for you so what this the first thing that they've done is basically where you've got these virtual channels on the on here so we've got the six faders but then you've also got up to three virtual channels let me just add a couple more in so if I go to faders and then we can add something in here so let's say I'm going to add this input here and let's add this input here just for the sake of showing you this so as you add more virtual channels in down here it's basically added in more down here as well so it always shows these six but if you've got one two or three of the virtual channels it kind of squeezes everything together to fit them on that's nothing new by the way that's just how it always was but the way that you previously adjusted the levels on these was that you pressed on the particular channel that you wanted and then you could use the rotary dial to move them up and down and then add in the previous beta firmware or the firmware update the ability to mute the channel by pressing and holding this one but that always seemed a little bit pointless to me because you would have had to have clicked on here in any case just to even get the controls up for that channel to then be able to mute it so what they've done now though is basically with a single push of the rotary dial here it then just cycles through which one of these is it's controlling so now it's controlling the first one and then if I press it again the second and then the third and then we can still do that thing of pressing and holding to mute so that is a pretty useful bit of functionality that they've added in they also say output delay is applied to USB 1 and USB 2 when set to main mix I couldn't quite figure out why or if this meant the USB 1 as in the first cable and the second cable or whether it meant the USB 1 main because if you just have a look at the wording of it it's a little bit unclear so it says here output delay is applied to USB 1 main and USB 2 when set to main mix so what about the USB 1 chat does it not apply to that so I wasn't really sure I need to just figure that one out then this one as well pressing the power button twice will power down the device because previously you had to kind of like push the button in and then it would pop up a thing on the screen to ask do you really want to switch it off which always felt like well it's got a pretty solid power button on the back so if I'm pressing it then presumably I do want to switch it off it's not something that you can easily accidentally press either and I could understand if they had that little pop up if you were recording so if there was you know it could sense that there was recording going on on the device itself that it would ask you sure you want to switch it off if you are recording well in any case now they've basically just added a double press effectively to switch the device off a couple of other things improvements here so bluetooth headset output optimization to improve ambient noise rejection I haven't really used the bluetooth much at all so I'll take the word for that voice effects and sensor button are linked to the sound channel with custom routing I know some people have had some issues have had some people asking me about this they were thinking that they should be able to hear things from like the sound effects or sound pads I should say or the smart pads but then it wasn't coming through on some of the channels so I don't know if that is something that's related to that that helps to fix that or not but I'll have to dig into it a little bit more and then what else these are all basically like little improvements and things like that so yeah I have updated and I will be making another video I know I will be but I haven't just done it yet but it will be coming out any day I have also got a bit of an update because one of the things that I'm doing on the Rokesta Pro 2 is I have got basically three channels that I'm using for with mix-minus so the USB this one the USB main is for my e-cam live with mix-minus on this one here the chat one I'm now using for the chat Discord so this is my Discord channel here and then the USB to the Rokesta Pro 2 secondary channel I'm using for zoom but then what I'm doing is I've also got a cable that is coming out of the computer and at the moment what I'm using is this device which basically I use this when I'm on the road to plug in earphones and a lovelier mic for zoom calls but it's basically just converts into a USB device on the computer and now I've got this plugged into one of the combo jacks at the back so I'm taking my system audio directly into another channel so now I've got system audio over here so it means I have now got total control USB sorry audio from system coming in on one channel and then I've got mix-minus on those other three channels this is not the best way to do this what I need to get is the like a TRS to an XLR to go into the back now DJ Rob from the Ecamm group pointed out that if I use just a regular XLR to TRS cable it'll only be mono but what I can do is there is a cable that you can get which is basically TRS to dual XLR let me see if I can find that and with that one you can plug it into two separate cables on the back with that one you can plug it into two separate jacks on the back or the XLR plugs on the back and then in the ROCASTER obviously we can do that thing where we do a linked pair so in here what I do is I just instead of this being input three and four you can just click on here make it stereo and so it links those two together so although you've got one TRS cable TRS being you know these sorts of little cables or connectors so then that would just go into the headphone socket on my Mac mini and then that would come to something which looks a little bit like this if I just get the thing up so this is the cable that we want this sort of thing so it's a TRS on one end but then it's got two XLR on the other end and so then that would plug into two of those sockets on the back fortunately I've got no friends coming over having podcasts with me so I don't ever plug anything else in in fact I'll only ever really have the main mic there will be a second mic that I'm going to be using for some other stuff that I'm doing and then there will be those two ports spare to plug this one in so then I will have like complete control basically over all of those different channels so let's have a little look what Pierre is saying on the beta we can now hear the voice effects directly if we use mix minus not sure yeah I'll have to dig into it I wasn't sure about that people have been having some strange issues with some of this stuff but then bear in mind it is a new device new software and certainly if you're on the beta then that's all new as well I've noticed the thing actually that was on the outro music that I have on my videos I'm still not sure quite why this is I just noticed it yesterday and I haven't really dug into it yet there's almost like a sort of I don't know pulsing sound to it so if you listen to the music it's as if there's something going on with I don't know if it's something related to the mix minus having some adverse effect on it but the music played from Ecamm Live is kind of like pulsing a little bit I can't really explain the sound of it but you can hear it if you know that it's there so I'll have to try and figure out what that is but as I say it could just be some slight issue with the beta because that's the point of beta isn't it to find out these issues and so yeah the dual XLR or dual jack 4 stereo so yeah that one cable seems to do it and then I'll have both of them going in here and then it'll just give me that full control and by the way the input that I used for that this one here the system audio where's it gone down here this one I would have assumed it would have been a line in maybe I'm just getting myself confused about this but in fact with line in I don't know whether it's because of the sort of cable I was using when I selected line in then I needed to increase the gain on it but then I got a lot of noise or interference whereas when I selected instrument it seemed to work fine but perhaps that's my misunderstanding of it but anyway I'll have a little bit more of a play around with that so we digressed a little bit from stream deck and loop deck but I hope that if you're watching on the replay that gave you a little bit of an insight into those two devices and which one might be right I've been meaning to make a full sort of comparison stream deck versus loop deck since they came out but I've just been so focused on stream deck that I've not got round to it but that is all for today so thank you all for coming along and thank you for everyone hanging out in the chat just a quick reminder channel memberships are now open on this channel so you can click the join button down below there are three levels and then with that you also get access to a special area of the discord however the discord server is totally free for anybody to join and you can go over to I don't cover it up take one tech.io family it used to be discord but I call it family now because I don't like the word server come and join my server sounds so impersonal doesn't it so much better I think to just come and join the family over there and you'll find that we're talking about all the sorts of things that I talk about on this channel so all of this stuff is just sort of public you can all come in and come and join the conversations about all these things related to ecamm live, roadcaster, stream deck, studio gear all of that kind of thing but then there is this extra special members area down here and here you can see we've got backstage past members get access to watch the live stream in here as well and they can talk in my ear if they want and ask me questions and then certainly when I start doing my interview shows as well it'll be a way to get that extra few questions in with the interviewees and then also the after party where all the fun happens but that is all for today thank you once again to everybody for coming along I will have my next a pro video out probably in the next day or two but apart from that I'll catch you all in another video very soon for those watching on the replay check out these videos coming up next