CHAPTER 13. ROUTING AND I/O
166
Audio and MIDI Track
Arm Buttons.
To permanently monitor the track's input, regardless of whether the track is armed or
clips are playing, choose
In
. This setting effectively turns the track into what is called
an Aux on some systems: the track is not used for recording but for bringing in a
signal from elsewhere (for instance, a ReWire slave program). With this setting, output
from the clips is suppressed. An In monitoring setting can be easily recognized even
when the In/Out section is hidden by the orange color of the track's Activator switch.
Monitoring can be turned off altogether by choosing the
Off
option. This is useful
when recording acoustic instruments which are monitored through the air, when
using an external mixing console for monitoring or when using an audio hardware
interface with a direct monitoring option that bypasses the computer so as to avoid
latency. Generally, it is preferable to work with an audio interface that allows for
negligible latencies (a few milliseconds). If you are recording into Live with monitoring
set to Off, you may want to make the Audio Preferences' Overall Latency adjustment,
which is described in the built-in program tutorial on setting up the Audio Preferences.
If multiple tracks are selected, pressing one of the Monitor buttons applies this selection to
all of the selected tracks.
13.2
External Audio In/Out
An audio interface's inputs are selected by choosing Ext. In from the Input Type chooser of
an audio track. The Input Channel chooser then offers the individual input channels. Entries
in this chooser each have meters next to their names to help you identify signal presence
and overload (when the meter ashes red). Setting up the audio interface's outputs works
the same way via the output chooser pair. If multiple tracks are selected, any changes you
make to these choosers will be applied to all selected tracks.
The list of available inputs and outputs depends on the Audio Preferences, which can be
