 The Rocaster Pro 2 firmware update 1.0.5 adds some new functionality which changes the way that we can use the Rocaster Pro 2 with applications like Ecum Live, Zoom, Teams and Discord. And in this video I'm going to explain to you what those features are so that you can understand how best to get things set up for your particular use case. And that's the key thing here, there is no one size fits all, it's more about just understanding the concepts so you can figure out the best way to get things set up for exactly what it is you want to do. I will of course be sharing my setup and what I'm using it for and how I've gone about that. And in doing that hopefully you will get a little bit more insight of how you can get things set up for what you want to do. Now this isn't going to be a full overview of the 1.0.5 release, indeed I've already made that video I'll leave a link to it down in the description as well as how to actually sign up for the beta program because at the time of recording this is still a beta release but it may have been fully released by the time you watch this. So let's get into these new features shall we and they are all related to the USB cables that you've got on the back. There are two USB cables on the back of the Rocaster Pro 2, let's call them the primary and the secondary. So the primary is the one that you would need to connect to your computer in any case if you want to maybe download the audio if you've recorded any to the to the device on the SD card on the back or to program the smart pads. You can do it on the device here as well but if you want to do that through the Road Central app you would need to be connected through this primary USB cable, the main first USB cable. However that's not what we're talking about today we're specifically talking about the audio channels that we've got and there are in fact two audio channels on that first USB cable and they are called Rocaster Pro 2 main and Rocaster Pro 2 chat that is how they appear on your system. There is also this second USB cable you don't need to connect that to your computer you could do though you can connect both of them or you could connect this to a second computer in fact and I'll be talking about why you might want to do that a little bit later as well. I do have both of these cables connected to my computer though and that effectively gives me three channels which you can see down below Rocaster Pro 2 chat main and secondary. So why have I got six down there? Well that's because there is actually a new feature that has been added and it doesn't give you six channels before you get excited but it does actually change the behavior of that main channel so you can see whereas before in the previous firmware versions it was just Rocaster Pro 2 main and now it may either show up as multitrack or stereo so I think it's worth actually just covering this part first so that you understand exactly why that might be. So in the previous version of the firmware basically over that first main channel it was actually sending out the multitrack mix so it was sending every single individual track over that USB so let me just maybe explain this a little bit better. If I come into the settings and I go to outputs then we've got multitrack. Now maybe it's worth explaining this from a point of view of just recording so when you are recording to the device itself you've got basically four different options or three and a three and a half maybe. The first one is if you have this set to off it means there's no multitrack recording it's just going to record a single file whatever inputs you've got coming into this you got audio sound effects on here maybe you've got two or three microphones plugged in and then you've adjusted different levels of different things on here it's just going to record those down to a single file so that would be multitrack is off but then you could have a multitrack on so you might want to record all of the individual tracks so that you can then do something with them later and the normal way that you might do that is to use this prefader and what that means is although you might be adjusting levels in here maybe you're live streaming or something like that and things are going out and you want to make sure the mix is all right but if you're going to go ahead later and do some editing and maybe repurposing things then you might want all of those individual tracks without all of these different levels adjusted and so that's what prefader is basically prefader so these are the faders before anything has been applied to them it's just going to take all the raw signals and then record those. Now you can also here opt to bypass processing as well so bearing in mind that in the Rocaster Pro 2 we've got a lot of really powerful audio processing that we can do to the signal as well and so you can actually turn that one on to bypass that so that then it's basically really is just going to take the complete raw signal so you wouldn't have any compression or anything like that that you'd applied to it you would then be able to do something with those after and maybe apply them after the fact. The other option though is post fader and that is basically whatever you've got things set here it's still going to record all of the individual tracks separately however if you've you know lowered the volume down here then it would be lower in the recording as well so hence the little warning sign there do you really want to do this because it's going to affect the signal that's been recorded so that is nothing new that is just to explain to you the difference between you know multi-track or not multi-track well now over on the USB so that was on recording previously on USB we only had the option of prefader or post fader we didn't have the option of it just being a stereo mix that is the or one of the new features that's been added in in 1.0.5 now why would you want that and which one should you have you may ask well if you are using a digital audio workstation a door on your computer and you want all of these tracks going into it so that you can then you know make adjustments maybe you're recording it maybe it's going into some other application adobe audition or something like that where you're going to be you know using all these separate tracks and you want to have full control over them then yes you would want something that's either prefader or post fader going in a multi-track mix going in however if you are if you don't know what a door is then likely you can just switch this one off or if you don't use one you can switch what this off certainly i am going to leave this off because all i want is a stereo mix going out into my computer because i'm just going to be basically taking everything that i've i've got going on here i just want it all mixed down into a single stereo mix that's what's going to be used as my input for e-cam live for zoom for anything else i'm not doing any other fancy audio so for me then i'm going to switch this off on the usb what you do on the recording is is entirely up to you but for me i'm going to switch that off because i don't really have a way of even recording the multi tracks so that is that is what i'm going to do there if you watched one of my previous videos about the best setup for the rocaster pro 2 with e-cam you may recall that in the e-cam live settings in the audio tab there was this option here to map input channels one and two to left and right stereo that was a requirement before because it helped get around an issue where previously we were only getting the multi track mix out we weren't having this option of the stereo mix that was the solution to stop this had a slight issue that where the faders even if you put the faders down you would still have the audio coming through so toggling that one on there fixed that issue if you had been using the rocaster pro 2 before with some things that work in browsers there was also an issue there with this multi track mix coming out over the usb however that has now been solved with this new setting so if you've come into your rocaster pro 2 and you've changed that to off then you can still map channels one and two to left and right stereo but it's just not quite as essential but since you've got a stereo mix going out it would make sense to do it so i'm leaving that on for now so that is all the about the different mix now i should say then that just coming back to these names what you'll see is if you have got the multi track on as i the pre fader of post fader it will show up as rocaster pro 2 main multi track whereas if you've got it off as i have now it will show up as rocaster pro 2 main stereo just on that main channel there what you need to make sure though is if you do set your computer up and you've got different you know applications like ecam live for example if you've got it set to one of those and then you go into your rocaster pro 2 and change from you know pre fader and post fader change it to off then you might find that whatever devices in or whatever applications you've got in your computer of then you know defaulted to whatever your audio default is so if i came into ecam for example selected rocaster pro 2 main multi track as my microphone i came in here and then i switched this over to switch it off then that that device would just sort of disappear from my computer and ecam would just go to whatever the system default was so just make sure that you get this set up as you want it and then set your audio settings but that is not the most exciting feature the exciting feature is the fact that we now have mix minus on all of the channels and in fact we have something even better but i'll come onto that in a while first of all what exactly is mix minus well if you are using the rocaster pro 2 as both an input device and an output device for a particular application let's take zoom then you are i've got in zoom you've got the rocaster pro 2 set as your microphone but also as the speaker the audio what you're hearing the audio from and so zoom is going to be sending the audio from all of the other participants sending that into the rocaster pro 2 it's going to be then in the mix of all of the different things that you've got coming into here with your microphone and everything like that and then it's going to be going straight back into zoom again as the microphone and what that means is that anything that the participants are saying will just basically do a bit of a loop round come straight back to them and they'll hear themselves back a moment or two later so what you need to do or what needs to happen is we need to remove the incoming signal on that particular channel from what's been sent down that channel again hence mix minus we're removing it from the mix and then they won't hear that that slap back now you should know that as well you won't actually hear anything in your in your monitors when you are listening to this so it could be that the people on the other side are saying i'm hearing echo they'll always call it echo not slap back but they'll say that and you'll wonder what's going on because you can't hear anything it's because you're only hearing it once but it's just making the return signal for them and they're the ones that are hearing it twice so this applies to any communication app where you're using it as an input and output device so zoom teams discord skype whatever it happens to be it also applies though to applications like ecum live because ecum live itself has built-in sound effects so we might have a movie that we play as part of a scene we might have audio in ecum itself we've got sound effects that we can trigger within ecum from ecum so those would be coming from ecum into the rocaster pro 2 but then they'd just be going straight back in again so once again when you're listening and recording you wouldn't hear any issue but then when you listen to the audio playback you would hear a duplication of anything that was originating from within ecum and that includes by the way interview mode so if you're using ecum live in interview mode this is an issue so that's where mix minus comes in we need to have mix minus switched on on any of these applications that have this two-way audio going on now what i should also say is if you're using these applications at the same time like with one another so for example you might have somebody on on interview mode in ecum live you're feeding that into a zoom call and then there's people on the zoom there as well that are communicating it's important that each single application has its own dedicated channel with mix minus on because bear in mind the mix minus it only removes it for that single channel so we want the zoom people to not hear themselves back but we do want them to hear anything that's going on in ecum so if we had set those both to exactly the same channel then it would be removing everything from zoom and everything from ecum and so the people in zoom wouldn't hear the ecum if that makes sense so you need to make sure that however many different things you have got you have got a separate dedicated mix minus channel for them so whilst on the rocaster pro 2 we do have two usb cables um you don't necessarily have to use both of them you could as i say just have the primary plugged in and then maybe you might want to use the the main channel so just popping those up again so you might have the the the main might be for ecum live and the chat might be for zoom and by the way system audio it doesn't necessarily matter if you have these on any particular any one of these particular channels because it's it's only a one way so system audio doesn't really need to have a mix minus it's only where you are going into some other thing but just bear in mind that if you have mix minus on the system or if you have the mix minus on the same channel as ecum live then in the ecum live settings what you would do is you would just come into here and then you have this broadcast system audio you'd need to make sure that that was still set to either when sharing the screen that's usually the default for ecum so you still are capturing it on ecum but if you had the the system audio on another channel what you would want to do is just make sure that you turn this one off so it says never so the ecum itself is not capturing system audio but maybe you're bringing that into one of the other channels and then you've got that in the mix so one way that you might want to use this is let's just say that you are using ecum live with zoom and you also have system audio and you want that completely separate so that you can have control over that well in that case what you might do is from these three channels down below in fact let me just move the one with the mix just so that we don't start getting too confused if i remove of course i had a 50 50 chance and i removed the wrong one so here we've got these three channels the chat main and secondary what you could do here is you could say well okay let's have ecum live as the main let's have chat as the zoom because people are talking and let's have the secondary as being system audio so what you would do there is you would come into ecum you can see here i've got rocaster pro 2 main set here i've also got in ecum rocaster pro 2 main stereo set as the source just down here as well and then you would go into zoom and you would set that to chat or secondary or whichever one you wanted and then you would just set your system audio to the other one again this is just assuming you've got both of these cables plugged in now basically you've got completely independent control over all of these three channels so you can have them all on a separate fader and what you'd need to do though is just make sure that on your ecum channel and your zoom channel that you do have mix minus turned on so let's take a look at exactly how you do that so let me just get this one out of the way back over to the rocaster pro 2 if i click on the settings and then i click on outputs and then i click on rooting that's the one rooting then here you can see now we've basically got usb one at the top that's main this one is the chat channel this one is the secondary channel and by the way this also applies to bluetooth so if you have got anything connected over bluetooth it also applies to that as well so then you can now choose between main or mix minus and this is what we always did have on the secondary channel but now we've got it on the main chat and the secondary as well so you just need to make sure that for anything that's a two-way communication you've got mix minus turned on they do have something here though which is this extra one here which is custom what that means is they give you basically full control over what you are sending out to each particular channel and in fact the way that this is set up here is simulating mix minus effectively you can see it's this is the particular channel that i'm talking about it's the usb one the main and then down here at the bottom it's got all of the other different channels and it's got little ticks next to the ones that are included in the mix and it's got a little cross next to any that are not and they're sort of slightly grayed out as well so at the moment everything is going into the usb main except the usb main itself so that's effectively simulating what mix minus is it's taking everything in and it's sending everything back out except that one well you could also say uh perhaps i don't want the zoom to be included and let's say i've got the zoom on the chat for example i might want to have a zoom call going in the background uh that is kind of like a back channel where we're talking about stuff uh or having people you know giving me information uh whilst i am live streaming for example and i might just not want that going out into the live stream and in which case i could just simply click on this one and it would eliminate it i would still be able to hear everything that was going on and imagine if i had friends i know it's hard to imagine but imagine if i had friends and i was doing a podcast with them and we were all in the same room together and we'd got two or three microphones plugged in and we were all you know three of us plugged in on our headphones as well what this would mean is that that zoom back channel they would all be able to hear that i'd be able to have full control over the audio for what they could hear but it just critically would not be going out into the mix which was going into ecum live for the recording for example so this is how this routing table works you can basically just choose anything that you want to go to anywhere he says pressing the wrong button so that's the the the way that this works is you can basically just have complete freedom of what is going to where now there is another way to do this though because i'm actually using this as a sort of back channel as well so what the what i'm doing with this is i do have a discord server and in fact if you want to join the take one tech community you can join at take one tech dot i o slash family where we talk about all the sorts of stuff that i talk about on this channel in fact and in fact one of the setups that i'm going to show you in a moment has come about because of a question that was asked in there which was slightly more complex and um a slightly more complex use case shall we say but one thing that i set up in my discord server was i wanted the ability through my channel memberships cue the memberships you can join by clicking on the join button down below any of my videos are on my channel homepage but one of those membership levels i actually have a thing called on air backstage which is basically whenever i'm live streaming to whatever platform it happens to be um i want the ability to have a you know basically live stream into the discord as well so that people can watch live but then also ask questions and i can hear the questions because i always feel a little bit disjointed when i am on on a live stream when i see comments come in maybe i'll look at them a little bit later they lose their context i forget what they're in reference to and it's not really a full conversation there's always the latency to deal with as well even if i think i've answered it i say does that answer the question and then we sit in there waiting while well the internet does its thing and gets the the message across so it is a little bit you know it's not a real conversation is it whereas i saw the opportunity though through the discord and through my memberships to open that up so if i come over to discord just quickly what i'll show you is here we are in the discord here are some of the topics and things like that that we talk about free to join discord by the way just to quickly pop that one up again so you can easily come in here we talk about all the sorts of topics that i talk about on the channel but down here in the members area we have this on air backstage and so the way that works is basically i go live into there before i go live on any other platform but then it just sort of it's just using the e-cam live virtual camera but then when i hit the go live button on e-cam it's uninterrupted into the on air backstage area and then i can do my live stream when i start having more interview guests on and people like that then people in the backstage area will be able to ask their questions and i'll be able to hear them as well and then get those questions answered and then after i click end on the live stream basically it still just continues on in the on air backstage area so then any other questions that need to get asked for the the person we're interviewing or whatever from those members they can get an asked answered i should say as well so the way that i'm doing that though is very similar to what i've just shown you but the thing that i wanted was although i could have used this rooting table if i get the right scene up although i could have used the rooting table to basically eliminate the chat from there you know the discord i could have eliminated that from the main i actually don't want to eliminate it because i want the option of bringing those people into the mix a little bit later so the way that i'm doing that is this if i just come out of here for a moment so the way i've got this set up is i've only got mix minus on all of these channels i haven't used the rooting table for what i'm doing right at the moment i've just got the mix minus on and so in fact the way that i've got it is this is my microphone this is the main channel that's for ecumlive this one is the chat which actually i'm using for discord and this one here is the secondary which i'm using for zoom so hopefully it should be pretty obvious but you just literally go into zoom for example come into your speakers and you can see we've got rocaster pro 2 secondary we've got main we've got chat so i just come in here and select rocaster pro 2 secondary for the both the speakers and the microphone and then if i come over to my discord then in here you just go into voice and video and there you can see i've got rocaster pro 2 chat and rocaster pro 2 chat so there are three individual channels now what i'm doing and i'll come to the system audio in a minute i've done a little bit of a trick there to give myself a fourth channel but what i'm doing then is on the rocaster pro 2 then i've got these four channels my microphone ecumlive discord and zoom so when i am on a live stream i want to be able to hear what's going on in the chat but i don't want it to go out into the mix so if i press the mute here that is basically muting that channel so it's not going out into the mix however it's also muting it for me so i can't hear what's going on you'll notice the little light down there it might not show up too well on the recording because it doesn't pick up the light as well but you can see it up here it's got this little red symbol so that shows that that channel is muted so that would mean that if i was in discord now as well i'd be able to hear the people in discord oh sorry the the people in discord would be able to hear the live stream i should say but we wouldn't be able to hear them so if you want to be able to hear them though you can hear any channel even if it isn't included in the mix by pressing this button here which is the listen button and the thing about doing that though is when i press that it actually excludes all of the other tracks so the idea behind these buttons here these listen buttons is that it's for you to be able to just hear that individual track maybe you might be playing music you might want to cue some music up or something and get to the right place or maybe you want to hear what somebody else is saying and just exclude everything that's going out so for you as the host just this is only on the first channel here the headphones channel you can press the listen button and listen to that channel at the exclusion of all others however you can actually just select multiple channels to listen to so in this case where i've got these four channels what i'm going to do is just actually press the listen button on all four of them now what that means is that i can hear myself back so i can monitor my microphone i can hear anything that's going on in ecamp i can also hear anything that's going on in the discord and i can also hear anything that was going on in zoom if i had a zoom call going so this might be for example running a workshop where i've got people coming in on interview mode in ecamp it's going into the zoom but then maybe we've got a back channel with guest speakers and things like that in discord for example so crucially though this one being muted although i can hear it it's not going out into the mix but the thing about this though rather than using the rooting table to sort of completely eliminate it is this means that if i do have somebody from the discord who i want to bring up and ask a question i probably wouldn't do it for like a back channel if it was a case of you know running a workshop in zoom where i've got guest speakers coming up we'd have another way of bringing them on there but certainly for this idea with the discord where you want to bring people up to ask questions maybe during the live stream or maybe you're doing an interview on the live stream and you want to take questions from the people in discord maybe bring them up on screen as well with ecamp then we could do that then what this means is all you need to do then is just actually take them off mute and then they come back into the mix and you can see that now those are all green because they are all uh i'm still listening to them all but i can just easily take one out of the mix if ever i want to do that same with the zoom you may maybe want to just eliminate the zoom from uh you know the uh from the recording um but you still want to be able to hear what's going on in there but the other thing you can do if you've got it set up this way is they've got this thing in the rocaster pro 2 whereby here i've got these two selected if i select these two as well they'll turn yellow and what that means is that then only they are hearing me and i'm hearing them and it's not going out into the mix so let's just say that we've got somebody in the back channel maybe i'm presenting something or i'm using ecamp for something and i'm playing a video and whilst the video is playing i want to be able to say something to these people in the back channel without it going out into the broadcast i would just press this button and you'll notice that both of these then turn yellow they turn yellow up there as well so whilst i did that you couldn't hear me but it was only going to this back channel so whilst i really love the rooting table and that ability to be able to have much more control over things is really great uh for me personally i'm going to stick to this way of doing it just because it gives me that extra versatility of being able to just easily you know bring somebody into the mix drop them back out of the mix and so on so that's how i'm using it but i mentioned that i do have another little trick up my sleeve and that is that in addition to the three usb channels that we've got i'm also taking a fourth from the computer into the roadcaster and you could do this in a number of ways and probably the way that i'm doing it is not really the most efficient but i am in the early stages of this so what i've got here is this is basically taking usb it takes either a microphone or headphones and converts them to usb i actually use this when i'm on the road i use it for just plugging in a lav mic and headphones when i'm on zoom a zoom call when i want to get to a slightly better audio and i don't have a full setup with me so that's what this is for but basically all you need to know is i've basically taken the headphones the audio from the system and i'm taking that into the back into the into the roadcaster pro 2 at the back here so just using one of these trs cables and then it's into one of these to take up the side a bit size and that will then plug into one of these combo jacks at the back now what i will do is i'll get a the proper cable which will be a an xlr and then i'll run the xlr cable to go to the computer and then i'll have a xlr to trs trs been these little ones to take it down to that size and then i'll just plug this straight into the headphones of my computer the only reason i'm using this which is a bit of a workaround at the moment it's just because i literally don't have the cable to do this i do have some longer ones of these which i could in theory plug in but you tend to get a bit of an interference on those they're not the best cables to run any real length and certainly not for any sort of quality audio that won't go in and out so that's just my lack of cables i need to sort out my cable gain game but what this is effectively doing is this is now showing up as another device and i'm on my computer for my output so this is what i've got selected as my system speakers just the same as if i was plugged into the back of my mac mini with a cable i could just set you know set the output to headphones what this means though is i've got microphone i've got ecamm i've got skype and skype discord and i've got zoom too many communications and then there's this one here so if i just pop over to let's go over to epidemic play some random playlist and now you should not be hearing that however if i come back over here to this one again now we've got system audio and i can just introduce that into the mix and that should in theory be coming through onto onto the audio you can see obviously there it's bouncing for down and so now i've basically got complete control over all the audio over four different channels and so you can probably see how you might want to be able to use this i'm not suggesting that you go and replicate all of this it's really to just demonstrate the principles of it and the core thing to remember here is any communication apps that require two-way audio you need to make sure you've got mix minus switched on for those and then if you are using two different applications at the same time together that need to be able to talk with one another like ecome live with zoom or something like that and then just make sure that they have got their own dedicated channel you don't need to split out the system audio onto its its own channel you could just run the system audio onto any one of those channels and that would be that would be fine because it's only sort of one way i'm doing it this way just because i do want that extra control over the system audio separate to all of the other ones and so we have got those three channels but then yeah we have always got these other connectors at the back that we can utilize as well if we if we have the right cables that is i hope you found that useful i'll leave a link to some of my other roadcaster pro 2 videos over on the right hand side now see you in there