 Hello, and welcome to the live stream. Today we are taking a look at Unify for the Mac. Now I've got to say right off the bat that this is as yet unreleased beta software. So there is a beta program and I'll give you details of how you can sign up for that in just a moment. But just note that, as I say, this is as yet unreleased beta software. So not only is it beta, but it's not actually a public beta either. So that means that if there are any issues with it, just be aware of that fact. Although having said that, I've been using it for a week without any issue whatsoever. So, but just wanted to make that perfectly clear from the start. And this is actually something that I'm really excited about when they announced Unify back whenever it was their new mixing software from from road. And I'll walk you through it, obviously, in a moment. It was a PC only. And so I was just really chomping at the bit to get all of the advanced routing that this gives us for the Mac. And as I say, now it's here, but really where this is going to add a lot of value is going to be people who are using the stream X, but also the Rocaster. So I know that it's talked about in terms of Unify really enhancing the stream X, but it can add a lot more functionality as well to your Rocaster, your Rocaster Duo or whatever it's got, but also actually just for general audio routing on your Mac as well. So even if you're not using an external device, maybe you're using one of the road mics, maybe the Podmite USB going into your Mac, and you want to do some of the sort of audio routing that we can do with the Rocaster, but just do it all in software. And then it's going to be really, really great for that. I'll just quickly mention though where to get the beta, or rather where to sign up for it so that you can get alerted as soon as it is available. And I'll drop the link into the chat and you'll find all of this in the description if you're watching on the replay as well. But basically it's this site here for Rode X, getting started with Rode X, the user guide. But if you scroll right down to the bottom here, you'll see that there is a sign up form at Unify for Mac beta program. So just go and enter your details there and then as soon as it is publicly available, you will be notified. So then what exactly is the Unify software? Let's take a look. So if I come over to my screen share, this is what it looks like on the desktop. And essentially it's kind of like a virtual mixer. Now what I'm going to do now is just bring in this other microphone. So I'm going to look like I'm at a press conference, but basically the audio that you're hearing is actually being rooted through my Rocaster Duo. And I've got another microphone plugged into the Streamer X so that we can take a look at. You can actually just see something moving on the screen here in terms of audio. But yeah, because I'm going to be messing around with all the audio rooting, I figured let me just keep it safe for today and root my audio through the Duo. So incidentally, as we'll see in a moment, the Unify stuff is also rooting through the Duo as well. So I'll explain how you can do that. But essentially what we've got here then is we've got a virtual mixing board and you can see that we've got one thing on the board as it were. And you can also see that it says here what that is. So right at the top there it's saying that it's the Streamer X microphone. And I mentioned it opens up a lot of functionality for the Streamer X. And you may recall, if you watched my previous video about the Streamer X, that we do have three separate mic inputs on the Streamer X. You've got basically the XLR on the back there. You've also got a headset port here. And then you can also pair it with a Rode Wireless Mi or Rode Wireless Go 2 as well. Now when you're using this with Rode Central, there are these three mic inputs and you can basically switch between them. So you can see there it's selected the headset. If I press it again, we've selected the wireless mic. And so that's how you kind of switch between them and you can adjust the levels in there. When you actually turn on Unify, it will detect that you've got a Streamer X attached. And it will say, do you want to use the Streamer X with Unify? And if you say yes there, then basically then we take control of the Streamer X into Unify. And one of the advantages of using this over the Rode Central for Streamer X is that you don't have to choose between the particular microphone input you want. You can actually select, you know, any one of them or all three in fact. So you could potentially then have the Streamer X giving you three microphone inputs from that one small device. I think it really does, you know, it just just enhance the Streamer X quite considerably. So the way that it works then is, as I say, we've got this virtual mixing board. Now as you can see here, we've got this little plus symbol so I can just add other things into this mix that we're creating here. But actually when you first start it up, it will take you through to this screen here, which is the channel assignment screen. And that looks something like this. If I put it somewhere where you can see it would help. It looks something like this. Now what you can see here is that is the one that we've already got on the board. But we do then have, as I say, these other two microphones that we can add in. So we could add in our headset. So if we had a headset mic plugged into the back of the Streamer X, we've got that wireless mic. So if we had a wireless mic, we can add that one in. But then don't forget, there is a kind of really a fourth microphone potentially, which is that you've got your HDMI in. Now if you are using the Road Streamer X as an HDMI capture device for your camera, technically you could plug a fourth microphone into your camera because the audio from that would get passed through as well. So, you know, that's a potential worker and to get up to four microphones out of that one little device. It's quite amazing really. Next you've got the USB 2. So that's the USB 2 channel from the Streamer X. So just to show you that again, on the back of the device, as well as having the USB 1 here, which is how it's connected and powered at the moment into my computer, there is also this secondary USB. So that could be from your, you know, another computer, a gaming device or whatever it happens to be. You could actually just plug that into the same computer. That's what I do with my Rocaster Duo and Rocaster Pro 2. They both go into the same computer to just give me an extra channel of input output. So that USB 2 there, though, does just show up as an option here. So these are all the Streamer X ones. You can see they say Streamer X on them there. And if I just close this down momentarily, you'll see that those are now all on this board. So we've got all of those different inputs. There are more, though. So if I come back over to that channel assignment, you can see that down here, we've also got some other audio devices. Now, these are virtual devices that show up on your computer. So when you, if I add this one in, for example, system, then this is going to be capturing the system audio, obviously. And so on your system, you will see something that says, in fact, let me just quickly grab a screenshot. I should have dropped this into my scene in advanced, naughty, not getting this prepared. I'll just drop it right in here, though. So here you can see this is my system audio, basically. And this is like in the Mac when you click the drop down. So these are all the different devices I've got. So you'll notice here that we've got the Rode Unify browser about halfway down. Rode Unify Chat, Unify Game, Unify Music, Unify System, Unify Virtual and Unify... Oh, that's it. Then we're into the Rocaster Duo. So that's just to say that all of these virtual devices are essentially just inputs and outputs on your computer that are then, you know, addressable. So you can send audio in. So let's say that you want to capture your system audio, but then maybe you want to also grab. Whoops, if I actually just grab the right thing on the screen there. If I grab the chat, the chat channel might be something that you want to have for Discord, perhaps, or maybe for a Zoom call or something. So you've got a separate channel for that. Then it's got music. So if you're going to be playing Spotify or some other music, bear in mind that, you know, when you're in your Spotify app, you can select the channel that you want. So you would just simply select the output from Spotify to be the Unify Music. So that's where it would go. So it would come into this channel. You've also got another one here for game. So if you want to, if you are playing games, you're streaming games, you could send it there. Just bear in mind as well that although they have given these names to, you know, give you some, some virtual things with some meaningful names, you know, you can actually use them for whatever you want. So I'll talk a bit later about, you know, doing some advanced audio routing with it. But certainly for me, you know, using Discord, Zoom, Ecamm Live, three communication style apps with two-way audio simultaneously, I need to have those all on their own dedicated channel. So it may be that, you know, I decide that I'm going to use chat for Discord. Maybe I might assign the music one to something else. So you can really use them for whatever you want. They just, they've just got that name. And then you've got one for the browser. And then you've also got this one here, this virtual. So that's just basically almost like a spare channel, if you like, that you can use for whatever you want as well. But it's just got this virtual name. So it's just from a point of view of being more sort of meaningful. But as you can see, if I just close this down, then now I've got all of those different things on this, this mixing board. And if they're off the edge, you can just sort of scroll along. So you can really add quite a lot to there. So what I'm going to do is just actually take off a few of those, just so that in, yes, yes. So I should be back. Sorry about that temporary little glitch there. That was just a bit of a bit of a computer overload. So hopefully the stream should be back up now. Let me just try and get things back up and running once again. Sorry for the slight, slight disruption there. This is just another thing pointing me to the gas. Takeouts. Try and get my stuff sorted out in the background as well. So let me say hello to a few people then, and I'll get back to the demo in a moment. Hey, Richard, great to see you here. Hey, Jamie, I hope everything's good with you too. Walter, yes, it's, so this is a pre-release version of the beta, as opposed to the release version. I left a link to go and sign up, which I think you already have. Actually, I've just noticed your other comment. So yeah, it's as yet unreleased, and I can't say when it's going to be officially released, but I just wanted to give you my impressions of it, and thank you to Road for giving me some early access to it. So I've been digging into it over the past week. And so yes, the buffering is all down to my system, getting a little bit overloaded. So let's take a look at this. Oh, hey, Michael, great to see you too. A glitch in the matrix indeed, or maybe a signal from the gas gods to upgrade my computer. Take two tech indeed, yes. I won't try a restart now, but what I will do is I will just try and open up some of my software again. I know me too as well. We're back, we're back again. Right, sorry about this. Let me carry on now. I think we're back in business. So let me pick up where we left off, and I do apologize for all the disruption here. The joys of live streaming. So let's take a look once again at Unify, and I'll try and pick up where we left off, which was with the, I've just shown you how you can do the audio routing. And what I'm going to do is the channel assignments. As I say here, you can see the system, the chat, the music and so on. So we can add those all into the mix as well. So then essentially we just have this large mixing board, and as you saw earlier, you can basically just, you know, add more things to this, and then this just becomes a scrolling mixing board. You can make this a little bit smaller, by the way, but in the horizontal direction if you want to resize it so you can make it a bit smaller. Also, once you've set all of the mixes up, which we'll look at in a moment, you don't have to have this actually open all the time. You can just set everything up and then have it running in the background. So if you are going to do some audio routing for your Discord or your Zoom calls or whatever it might be, or your gameplay, whatever, then you can get all this set up and then, you know, put it in the background and just have it running as a background process. So let's talk about then the different mixes that you can have. Obviously here what we're doing is, you know, this is effectively a mixing board, isn't it? You can see we can adjust these faders up and down and adjust the levels. You've essentially got, though, we've talked about the inputs, so that being all of those different inputs that you've got here on the channel assignment. So those are all the inputs, but bear in mind that some of these can also be outputs. So I think that sometimes people can get confused a little bit by, you know, what's an input and what's an output. I find that when I'm on coaching calls with people with the ROCASTER Pro 2 or the ROCASTER Duo now as well, that, yeah, sometimes people get confused about where, you know, what's coming in and what's going out. Well, what you're looking at here is actually the input levels. So that's showing you the level of, oh, sorry, the inputs coming in, that is showing you the level that is going out to, in this case, the stream mix. So you're going to have one main mix that is going out for, you know, the, yeah, everything's coming into this as a little audio hub, and then everything's going out to the stream, but you're also listening in your headphones. So that is a separate one down here where it's showing you the headphones that you are going to, but you can actually choose what you want to monitor. So I'll talk about different mixes in a moment, but you can choose what it is that you're actually listening to in your headphones, but there's also an option over here to choose a monitor out that's a speaker as well. So we've actually got two sort of outputs aside from all of these different mixes. So here we've got the main stream mix, and as I say, you could just adjust all the levels. Maybe, you know, you want the, if you've got stuff coming in on this mic, you might want to tie it all lower, but then you've got all of these other different mixes. So you've got the stream mix there. You've got the headphone mix, which is the one that's going to your headphones. So let's say, for example, you want something set up where in your stream, maybe you've got a channel here, say the Streamer X USB 2. Maybe that's coming from another device and you don't actually want to hear that in the main mix, but you do want to hear it in your headphones so you can switch over to the headphones. Now, with any one of these ones here, what you'll notice is you've got this extra little blue icon on the side there, and what that means is that that's where the level is set for the stream. So the stream is kind of like, think of that as the main mix, but now we can adjust this for the, in this case, the USB 2, that is going to the headphones here. But you've also got this option here to either link it to the main channel or to break that link. Now, what that means is if I was to link it to that main channel and then I was to go back to the stream and I'll push that level up a bit, then you'll notice that in the headphones, it's also pushed the headphones up because that difference between those two there is now completely linked, whereas if I was to break that link, then no matter what I do to the main stream mix is going to have no impact if I go back to that headphone mix on that level there. So that's how you can use these faders on each individual mix. So that is what I'm hearing in my headphones, but then we've also got chat recording, which I'll come to in a moment, monitor and USB 2. So it may be that the chat, if your Zoom is on chat or whatever, then you can select chat here and you can then adjust the level of that. And of course, if you've got the chat channel in here, maybe I'll just tempt fate and try to add this back in again. So if I put the chat channel in there and click on finish, we've now got that chat channel and it has been muted for itself. So basically what that means is that's kind of like Mix-minus. Mix-minus is whereby anything that's coming in on that channel is not being sent back down it because that would cause what they call slapback. So that would mean that the people in Zoom, for example, can't hear themselves or the people in Discord are not hearing themselves back with slapback echo, whatever people want to call it. And so that's what that is doing. But that means that you can adjust all of these mixes, as I say, individually for all of these different things here. So we've got the headphone mix, the chat, the monitor out, the monitor being this one just down here. And then we've also got the USB 2. So it means that as well as audio coming in on that USB 2, then you can also send audio back out through that as well. The USB 2 on the Streamer X is what I'm referring to there. So we've got this secondary USB. Now that could be going to a second computer but again, you could have that plugged into the same computer to just give you an extra two-way communication channel there. So that's how the sort of mixing board works. So if there's any questions about that, then do drop them in. And of course, as we go along. And yeah, just to answer your question there, Shane, USB 2 can also be another... Oh, sorry, another mic. I'll have to get back to you on that one. I understand that the pod mic USB can plug into the Rocaster and the Rocaster Duo. I don't actually think that it can plug into here, but I might be wrong about that. I'll have to get back to you on that one, Shane. I'll have to test it out. I'll definitely test that one and let you know. Hey, Elizabeth, great to see you here. And hey, Roy, great to see you too. I need you to find so I can make more mistakes. That's the trouble with these things. They've got so much power that it is easy to overlook minor little things that can cause issues, but it happens to us all. As you can see, having a bit of a tech day of it today myself as well. So yeah, coming back over to the app though, the outputs then. So you've got the headphones, so that's what you're hearing. But you've also got this one here that's monitoring. And by the way, you can just mute that. So if you wanted to mute your headphones, you could do it there in the software, so just clicking that one. And you could also choose what you want to listen to. So it may be that you want to have the headphone mix, but maybe as you're setting this up, you want to be able to just see, you know, actually listen to what all of these things are sounding like to make sure that the levels are all correct. So as well as having one that's just your dedicated, you know, in headphones channel, you can also just then go through and just monitor each of these individual ones in your headphones to just listen to, you know, the levels that you are setting in here. Then over this side, you've got this one, which is a monitor channel. And once again, there is a dedicated monitor channel, but you could actually send any one of these different mixes out to that channel. And then here you can select where that's going to. So this is going to give you a list of all of the different speakers, apart from the UniFi outputs. It's going to give you a list of all of the different audio output devices that you've got attached to your computer. So at the moment, I've got this going into my Rocaster Duo secondary. And what this means is then that I'm using UniFi to give me an extra layer of mixing into the Rocaster or the Rocaster Duo. And this was something that came up on the live stream last week, where I was talking all about the Rocaster Duo. And somebody asked this specific question, will we be able to use UniFi with the Rocaster Duo? And the answer is yes. So you can just literally come in here and select the, you know, the output that you want with that, so the Rocaster or Rocaster Pro 2, Rocaster Duo, or any other external device you've got for that matter. And what that means is you're going to have a dedicated mix which is going into there. So if it is the case that, you know, you want to have some additional mixing capabilities more so than you've got with the already, you know, quite helpful three USB channels on the Rocaster Pro 2 and the Rocaster Duo, then technically you're going to have like an extra level of software mixing going on here. And then maybe feed that into one of those channels to then give you that extra level of control over stuff. So it's a really interesting pairing because I was always looking for like ways to get a little bit more fine control with the Rocaster Pro 2 and now the Duo to be able to, you know, bring in different apps and adjust levels independently. So this is effectively going to allow you to do that. So I'll come into the settings here as well because there is some preferences. And if I come into the preferences, you'll notice we've got recording, so stereo or multi-track because that's the thing about this Unify software is it is actually also a recording software. So you can record, as you can see, either stereo or you can actually record the full multi-track mix from here. So if I come over into this recording section, well, first of all, you can see that there is a big record button at the front top here. So if I click that, it is now actually just recording. We've got some similar functionality as we've got on the Rocaster Pro 2, the Rocaster Duo. You can drop in a little marker if you want, drop in little timestamps as you're going through. And if I, whoops, I've double clicked there, click that. And if I come over into this section then, which is the recording section, then here you'll see the recording that I've just made. You can obviously playback the recording. There is the exporting, so you can export for a custom platform. If you're recording your podcast on this, for example, choose the format, the frequency and all of that kind of stuff. And then also you can just export from here too. And then you can, if you want to go through and color code all of these. So you can see that that is the color coding of that, maybe for a good take or a bad take or whatever it might be or for just to color code your recordings. And then obviously whilst you are in this mode, in this recording mode, you've got the playback is what you're hearing in your headphones and also in your monitors as well. Your speakers, I should say. So that's the recording feature. They do also, you can actually sort of zoom in on different places here, move the timeline back and forth and so on. So that's the recording feature. Now that's probably not something that I personally would be using too much, but it's great that we've got this as an option too. They're kind of almost replicating a lot of the functionality of the Rocaster, but just in software. So let's come back to the mixer for a moment and I'll just check in with a few questions as we come. Indeed, that is this, isn't it Jamie? With increased flexibility comes increased complexity. Although I've got to say, from a usability point of view, when you get the software and it just detects that you've got the Streamer X plugged in and then you just, as I say, it just detects and say, do you want to use Streamer X with Unify? It does actually go through and set up a lot of the stuff for you, so putting in the different mixes and so on. So this thing is quite easy to get set up, it's when it comes down to, you know, you're creating all of the different sub-mixes and things like that that we can get ourselves caught out. One of the things that I think is worth really noting here, if I just come back to the sub-mixes, something that could well potentially catch people out is let's say that you're creating a mix for USB 2 and you want to, just for the sake of argument, you want to reduce the volume slightly of the chat, but you've still got it linked to the main one here. So we've got this little link icon down there selected. Let me just drop this little comment off just so that we can see. So let's say you've got the, as I say, you've got this fader down here. So what's happening there is we've got this level for the chat set lower than the stream mix for that particular channel. But you still want the audio to actually pass through just at a lower volume. Well, if it is linked like this, what you could have is you could have a situation where if I go to stream and then I move this fader down, let's say to there, then we come back to that one that we were just in, which was the chat, where were we? USB 2, sorry. You can see that that's now gone down to zero. So you do have to be conscious of where you've set all of these relative levels if they are linked to the main mix just because you could be in a situation where, as I say, you think you've just got something at a slightly lower volume when in actual fact, when you move the main one down, you've actually cut it off altogether. So that's just something to be mindful of that you understand where all your, or remember where all of those relative levels are. Let me just check in with a few more of these. So once we get unified, will we even need Road Central except maybe to do firmware updates? The firmware updates can be done through this as well. I will say that Road Central is probably going to be what most people will use just because it simplifies the process. I mean, we've got those very clear things of this is for presentation mode, this is for streaming and so on, and you can create those custom mixes. I'm really hoping that they add in custom mix presets in Road Central so that we can actually just create two or three. That would be really useful. But the very thing that I was just talking about actually is the reason why I think a lot of people maybe don't necessarily need this. They're not setting a different mix for each individual channel and maybe not so geeky as a lot of us. But in theory, no, you wouldn't necessarily need to use Road Central. The firmware updates do come in here. So if I go into available firmware, it will just check if there's firmware for the device as well, for the Streamer X when it's plugged in. I should also say, whilst we're here, speaking of the link in with Streamer X, one thing that I haven't mentioned is obviously the sound pads here. So this is exactly the same way as in Road Central, we can update the sound pads. Well, we can actually do that from here and we just simply right-click on it and we've got the same familiar interface that we have in Road Central, but it's just here as a pop-up. And I find that actually the interface for things like this in Unify is slightly better than Road Central, just because it is right here, you can just right-click it. You can just go into any extra layer of settings, obviously, because this is intended to be an app that you interact with as opposed to Road Central, which is more to go in and makes changes. So it's a kind of different style of app, really. But here, yeah, you can do all the same things, you know, add the effects and so on, add the MIDI. And here you can choose. So for the voice effects, obviously we've now got three mic inputs rather than just the one. So you can set things up for, you know, what do you want that to apply to. So maybe you want this, you know, robot voice or whatever to apply to your main mic, the headset mic or the wireless mic. So that button, you know, you could have a button to apply it to different ones. So that's another sort of slight difference with Road Central, because we have got those three different inputs. We've got the same thing, obviously, the mixer, the MIDI controls and all of that kind of stuff there as well. One other things, well, and by the way, you can switch to presentation mode. You can see to go forward and backwards on your slide deck and then also start presentation and so on. And so this whole thing, you know, using presentation mode, I've had a number of people asking me about Streamer X, because they want something just a small lightweight device on their desk that's a small footprint more to the point that they can then use for online meetings and presentations. Well, this does give you the audio routing then, you know, to have your Zoom on one channel apply the Mix Minus to your Zoom channel in your presentation and so on. And you've got that same presentation mode just here as we have in Road Central. Another thing whilst we're comparing Road Central with the Unify is that when you come into the microphone, if you click on a microphone, you can see that we've got this. I actually prefer the interface of this to the Road Central. But one of the main reasons why I prefer it is because you have actually got this live update in exactly the same way as we have on the, sorry, live charts in exactly the same way as we have on the actual Roadcaster Pro 2, on the Roadcaster Duo on the screen. Sorry, let me get that back up again. Well, we have that same thing here. So that means that when you are adjusting the noise gate, and by the way, I've left a link in the description to a previous video I did all about how to get optimum setting out of this advanced audio processing. So I won't go through all of this. But just to give you an example, with the noise gate, this is basically how much audio has been let through, like when you're not talking effectively. So if I stop talking, you see that that line goes all the way down to zero. So that's basically, you know, do we want to have the audio completely stop when I stop talking, or do we want to just let it through? And in fact, I would have to do this on my other Roadcaster, but if I had my, let me do this on here, on the fly. If I just turn the noise gate off for a second on my the one that you're hearing me on now, then you can probably hear this background noise all the time, because I've got an air con going, and there's various of the little noises here and there. But I have the noise gate on so that when I'm not speaking, I actually have it so that it shuts completely. So just coming to this then, with the noise gate in the Unify, you get to see this little chart. So this line going up and down is my voice. This white dotted line here, the top one, that's the threshold which the noise gate is going to open or close. So that's what this value is here, the threshold. I can move it up and down. So if I had it up there, you can see that the lines white. Basically, that means that there's no audio coming through because I'm not speaking loud enough to trigger the gate to open. Whereas if I move the threshold down to a point at which my voice is above it, you can see now that it is kind of opening and closing. So when the line is green, the gate is open, and when it's white, it's closed. There's lots of points here where I'm dropping down below that level and the gate is basically shutting again. So let me just adjust that and put it down to something perhaps a little bit more reasonable. I've got the microphone in a weird place here as well. You can just the microphone gain here as well. But then you've got the attack which is how quickly it opens effectively. The hold is how long it kind of holds the gate open before it decides to shut. And then the release is how quickly it actually shuts after the levels drop below that level. And this range is the thing I was talking about. I like to have my noise gate shut completely so that when I'm not talking there is complete silence. And that's because generally I use these devices, although I'm obviously streaming now, predominantly they get used in online meetings and presentations and stuff like that, where I don't want to have to mute myself in the software, but I just wanted to be that when I'm not speaking, none of my audio is coming through. So nobody can hear me typing on the keyboard or doing whatever, you know, clicking my pen whatever. So I have the noise gate go completely shut effectively, but you can adjust this. So if it was at this 50 here, that's effectively going to be allowing, I guess half the audio to come through. And if it was up to zero, then basically that's not doing any closing off of the audio whatsoever. So that's how I tend to set mine. And then the hysteresis here just quickly is this is where you've got this second lower dotted line here. And that is instead of having the same threshold for the trigger point for it to open and close the gate, the threshold becomes the point at which the gate opens. But then if I turn the hysteresis here to 50%, that means that the level of the point, you know, the trigger to actually close the gate is effectively going to be 50% lower than the than the opening point. So you can see that even when my audio now drops below this dotted line here, the top dotted line, the gate still stays open and it's still green. Whereas if the hysteresis was all the way up here, it goes white as soon as it drops down underneath that line. So that's basically just to set a different level. And you can have that anyway up to 100% is basically once it switched on, it would never switch off. So that would be pointless. I tend to have mine at around about 50. It seems to cover any sort of background noise. So it's not going to get triggered by anything. And that's that's fine for me. So that's what the way I set mine up. I digress though because this is just all to show you the fact that you do have this live view. And I find that these charts are really useful when you are making settings to this. And of course, we have got the same things like the compressor and I explain all of this in the Rocaster Masterclass. I'll leave a link to that. I'll drop a link into the chat as well. But the Rocaster Masterclass basically covers all of these audio settings and is really kind of the reason why I did it. Why I made the course that is. I also did a whole live stream specifically about these advanced audio settings as well. So you can find a link to that in the description as well. And so let's go through these. So you got the compressor the exciter that is, you know, adjusting the higher end and lower end frequencies, the high pass filter. And so just having this as a visual, I think it's really nice that they've bought these over from the as I say from the actual screen of the Rocaster Pro 2. This is what you see whereas in Road Central, it shows you kind of like, you've got a space for the graph, but it's not dynamically updating in the same way as this. And then we've got the equalizer and de-esser. So yeah, this will stem from a question from Roy who was asking about, you know, do you even need Road Central once you've got Unify? And it's really a choice as to which one you'd prefer to use really. And once you do set up, once you open Unify, if it detects Streamer X, you can then select that you want to use that. Once you've selected these mixes and set these all up exactly as you want them, then you can just, you know, if I was to close this down now, it would say, do you want to quit Unify or do you want it to run in the background? So you can set all these mixes up and it can run in the background. But here this is where to answer the question from last week. If you were tuned in last week and somebody had asked about, you know, can this be used with the Rocaster Duo? And this is exactly what I'm doing now. So I've got my monitor here going out to the Rocaster Duo. And actually, hopefully, if I just unmute this for you, I switched all this off, but I'll unmute this for you. So now if I press a button on my Streamer X Famous Last Words, let me try to do this. Is that coming through? There we go. Famous Last Words. I think I've oh, it's because I'm pressing the wrong one. That's why. Let me change over to this screen. Let me try this. Okay, so if I press this button here. Hopefully you can hear that that is audio that has been activated from my Streamer X. So it's there built in sort of music bed. But that is now feeding through the monitor channel into my Rocaster Duo and into the and into the mix that you're hearing. So that audio was just basically passing through Unify and that was just to demonstrate, you know, obviously you've got soundpads on the Rocaster Duo as well. So you probably wouldn't use it to play audio from your soundpads on your Streamer X through the Duo. But what that means is you would also be hearing all of the other audio there as well. And in fact, my mic audio would be coming through on that as well. So that's how you can basically use this, you know, as an enhanced interface to give you some extra mixing capabilities for your Rocaster as well. One other thing I've talked about the recording, obviously, where you can just hit the record button there. You can select a separate mix for that as well. So that is one of the things where you can set up a mix. So maybe you're recording a podcast, maybe you've got a discord going in the background and you don't want that to come through. So maybe you want to just say, okay, let me just remove that completely. So that one's off. But I do want you know, I want to be able to hear that during the podcast if you want people talking to you whilst you are whilst you're recording your podcast. Let me just check in with some of these questions. If I connect USB 2 to another computer, can I send a different audio channel to it, like for a zoom call mix minus? Yet you certainly can if you if I come back over to here a second. So the USB 2 is actually an output as well. So the USB 2 is obviously we've got an input there but it is an output as well. That's the input. So if you are on the USB 2, you can basically root whatever you want to it. So maybe you want if let's say that I'm not sure that is the if the zoom call is on the other computer you could just eliminate itself, you know, to turn on mix effectively mix minus there or if you mean that you're feeding stuff from a zoom call into a second computer, then it just be a case of choosing the channel. Maybe this is your zoom and you've assigned zoom to unify chat channel because as I mentioned, you know, all of these things do just show up as as you know outputs that you can assign. So if you've done that, where was that that overlay that I just had with it on this one? So yeah, you see you see in your outputs in zoom, for example, you can assign that to any one of those channels about halfway down. I've got a load of my other ones at the top, but you can see road unify, browser chat, game music system, virtual and so on. So you could assign zoom to the chat channel and then that would then just you know, you can just route that down the USB to if that's what you're talking about. So yeah one thing about this to just note and it's one thing that's slightly different between unify on the Mac and the and the PC. In fact, I think it's the only real difference technically from a routing point of view. Well, obviously technically there's a lot of different coding but I mean from a functionality point of view with unify on the Mac, basically you can adjust the you can create all of these different mixes but you can't pull in a specific app. So you can't just say you know, if you've got some some other kind of app running on your computer and you want to pull in, you know, that specific app, rather you can just pull in the audio from things where you're basically assigning it. So like for example, I'm not explaining that very well, like in discord, you can set the speaker and the microphone. So that's how you would assign discord, for example, to the chat you just go in pulling up that list that I just had up on screen and then on in discord you would set your output to be the unify chat but in an app that doesn't have that like I don't know, Excel maybe if you've got some little audio file playing in Excel you can't really designate in Excel where you want to play the audio it's just going to go to system audio so it is kind of like a catchall for everything which is system audio and then these other ones can only be assigned for, you know, things where you can actually assign an output if that's making sense, like Spotify, for example, you can select where you want the audio to go. I mean usually it's a bit of a non-issue really because everything that you would normally want to be able to route from an audio point of view if it's some sort of audio generating application or an application that uses audio, it will always have an output anyway so it's kind of really a non issue I think but it's just worth just sort of mentioning that, that I think in Unify on PC you can actually specify specific applications if there's audio running in it, you can bring it in that way but as I say, it's not really really an issue there is there any comparison between Unify and Loopback in terms of routing, oops let me bring that up again sorry just killed your comment there is there any comparison between Unify and Loopback in terms of routing system audio to road products yeah so what I would say is Loopback is an audio routing application for the Mac that allows you to route audio from actually in that case you can route audio from any application to anywhere and you can set up all these complex things what I found with being people's tech support for these things is that Loopback was a bit confusing for a lot of people what I like about this and where this kind of can replicate that you can do with Loopback sorry that you can't do with Unify but Unify just has this nice interface where you can actually see what's going on and I think it makes it a lot more intuitive that rather than creating these virtual devices just in a little chart style format which is what you do in Loopback that Unify just makes it you can actually see the levels moving when you've got audio coming in you can actually monitor to listen to what are they going to actually hear in Zoom because as I mentioned you can come over here and you can select your headphones you can say right I've set up this mix that is specific for my chat so let me go ahead and now listen to what they're listening to so there's that element of just being able to actually test all of this stuff out and have that confidence that stuff's going where it needs to I think with Loopback what a lot of people felt was on why people felt that there was complexity to it is that it was not just virtual in terms of creating virtual devices but it was also just virtual in the sense that a bit of a mystery is to whether it was even working until the point where you're actually putting it into action if that makes sense so but to answer your question for general stuff that you might be doing with Zoom with Ecamm Live and things like that this would totally replace Loopback for that you could certainly do all the things of having Ecamm Live routing audio into into Zoom and Zoom routing the audio back into Ecamm Live and having your microphone in that mix for everybody as well so that you're then taking your Ecamm audio into Zoom and any other thing like your sound pads and stuff like that and then you're also capturing your Zoom audio to go back into Ecamm if you want to record your Zoom session in Ecamm with your full Ecamm production but also be capturing the audio of your participants as well so it would totally replace Loopback from that point of view and that's audio routing and arguably easier and more routing as well because then you're not having to set up these individual mixes in Loopback where you're creating I need one for Zoom, I need one for Teams I need one for Skype or whatever different applications that you're using where previously you would have used Loopback now it's just a case of well when I'm in a Teams meeting I'm going to set it up to the unified chat channel for example and I'm going to set it up to at the same time and it means you don't need to go through and select a whole load of different things I know that when I look at my Loopback profile or whatever Loopback application it's got so many different things in that are essentially just solved with a couple of simple mixes in Unify or the ROCASTER or whatever so yeah hope that answers that question let me see where I am in terms of comments can any software be used with shortcuts commands from Stream Deck and not at the moment as such as always there is ways with keyboard maestro but there aren't let me just double check this quickly I'll rephrase that I haven't found or haven't really looked let's be honest I haven't looked for keyboard shortcuts for some of these things so it would be interesting to see if we can assign keyboard shortcuts I'll say as well there isn't a big menu bar like you would get in some apps on the Mac where you have the menu let me rephrase that in the menu bar of the Mac when you open an app you've got obviously a series of different menus so there isn't really much in the RODIFI the RODIFI menu we've basically got hide, unify or quick unify so you don't have like a long thing with lots of different actions including the interface itself so no whether that's something that will come later to be able to assign keyboard shortcuts we will see but as yet there is nothing to do that with there is obviously one thing with the actual pads on the Streamer X you can assign certain things so for example you can have mixer effects so if you want to do things like well in fact they've got in here I haven't actually looked at that beep tone or that's the image maybe I haven't got quite as many that's something I haven't looked at haven't got quite as many of the mixer actions I was going to say you can do things like ducking and things like that but that doesn't seem to be in here but that might be just a beta thing I don't know so no you can't do that what you can do is go the opposite way though Peter which is you can use the MIDI controls to then potentially control other things with the Streamer X and you can set that all up in here just as you can in Road Central so for example people are using Ecamm Live and are not using a Stream Deck and I don't know who is doing that in this day and age because Stream Deck just does enhance that but you could use the app ELMC Ecamm Live MIDI Controller and then you could assign the buttons here two different MIDI controls so you could technically be switching scenes with a button on your Streamer X and incidentally you can do that on the ROCUSTER as well the ROCUSTER Pro 2 as well and you can even grab the MIDI from a fader so you could technically have a fader on your ROCUSTER Pro 2 that is adjusting your guest audio in Ecamm Live as well incidentally I mentioned Stream Deck just there I normally mention my ROCUSTER Masterclass here when I'm talking about road products I do just want to mention though that I did launch my Stream Deck Masterclass just earlier this week and there is 25% off if you sign up by the end of the month so the Stream Deck Masterclass is 88 there you can see it 87 lessons covering all things Stream Deck and really what this is intended to be is first of all a foundation of Stream Deck so obviously it covers all the different models the basics of setting it up understanding plugins and actions so it gives you a foundation of just like how do you even use this thing but then the next two is organization and personalization of your Stream Deck and these are two I think often overlooked aspects of Stream Deck because what you're essentially doing when you've got your Stream Deck is you've got a blank canvas and you are in control of your own user interface so it's really important actually that it's easy to use for you it's intuitive you've got some sort of organization because you quickly find that even if you've got a 32 key you'll quickly fill those up so talk about how to effectively do that and then the personalization is not about making it look pretty although that is a kind of side effect it's about designing a user interface that works and that becomes a joy to use as well bear in mind that companies spend millions and millions of dollars on user interface design and yet with Stream Deck sometimes people throw a load of random icons up there and then wonder why they're not using it when it's not really intuitive they're not really sure what button to press and it just doesn't become part of their workflow and they don't get the most out of it so those two are really important parts actually and I give you sort of foundations and a framework there to set up a system that is going to work for you then I focus in on three really core areas of Stream Deck so one is that it is the ultimate productivity tool and when I bought my first Stream Deck it was for live streaming I didn't realize actually how much it was going to revolutionize productivity in everything I do so I've got a whole section on there about how to use it as the personal productivity tool then going on to obviously its intended purpose maybe is what is originally conceived for live streaming and video production so we've got a whole section on that and then finally we've got another section on elevating your online meetings and presentations and how actually one of the things that people are daunted by when they're looking to enhance their online presence by using all these things the Stream Deck really unifies all of those things together and so instead of feeling like you're fumbling around with multiple different applications you've actually just got one sort of mission control and explain how to do that and then we go on to the inevitable what happens when they start multiplying and you start using multiple Stream Deck so I cover that in there as well and then finally we've just got some going through the Stream Deck preferences, the next steps and things like that in the Stream Deck menus as well so that is what is covered off in the Stream Deck Masterclass as I say you can get 25% off if you sign up for June there is a coupon code but it's automatically applied so when you go over to the page it will look something like this you can come down here get instant access, check out some of the reviews and check out what's inside as well and as I say that will just be automatically applied through to the end of the June but of course you do get that but do be sure to check out the Take One Tech Academy as well because all of my courses are included for members of the Academy so there we go slight digression into Stream Deck but since the question did come up about Stream Deck I thought it was worth mentioning just coming back to the range on the gate how much the gate is closed yes that is the Snore Guard so you have an XDM100 which is a USB mic so hopefully the Streamer X can see it if it is plugged into the USB 2 slot I'll check that out actually yeah I'll check that out because as I say I do understand that the PodMic USB will plug into the USB socket on the Rokaster Duo I just haven't actually tried it and I can't recall whether it will work on this but I will check that out for you so let me check in down here where we've got to another one here show you should make a video just showing how many mic you can get into the Streamer X and Unify basically just a test for the options yeah definitely I will be testing out the boom mic and the wireless as well I'm really interested to see obviously we can apply all of the same audio processing to those microphones as we can the XLR mic so I'm really interested I'm sure that we're going to get really great audio quality out of those as well I'm not one to wear cans as it were on the head with a big boom mic but nevertheless I know lots of people do so the Rode NTH100 there is a boom attachment for this that comes out to the front so I'll see how that one sounds as well and then also the wireless I'm really interested in the wireless because previously I was using a small rig so I had this set one thing I liked about this particular set was that it does come in a nice little case so this is small rigs wireless mic but then it means that you've got to have the receiver you've got to have the transmitter plugged into the the back using one of Rode's little attachments there the wireless mics though just pairing so the Rode Wireless me and the Rode Wireless go to just pairing directly with Streamer X RodeCaster Duo and RodeCaster Pro 2 is just a really nice sort of convenient feature so I'll definitely be testing that all out as well let me see if I have missed any questions down here hey Aubrey great to see you thanks for stopping by yeah so in terms of other features of Unify I think I've pretty much gone over everything in terms of the functionality as I say there is a public beta that you can sign up to that it's not actually quite live yet but you can certainly sign up to it and you will get notified when it goes live and that is about it in terms of the overall functionality but if there's any other questions about Unify or maybe about Streamer X or the RodeCaster Duo I love the fact that Unify gives us all of this extra routing capability for the Streamer X but I am totally in love with the RodeCaster Duo as well I've said it so many times in different posts and videos and stuff but the RodeCaster Duo just feels like Rode made that device just for me because it's got exactly everything that I needed in that one smaller form factor so I'm really loving that but now to add Unify for that extra control I think that is going to be a really great pairing as well so what I'll do is I'll leave a link to some of my other Rode content for those watching on the replay thanks so much for watching you'll find a link to that over there and I'll be posting a whole series of videos all about a deep dive into the software and also some more in-depth reviews of the Streamer X and the PodMic USB as well in TubeCourse. Have a great day everyone see you next time