I/O Card Insert Bypass Soft Key

[ChrisA]

I use an SQ6 that utilizes Waves SuperRack for Live effects via a waves card… It’s never happened but I’m paranoid that if that computer froze I’d instantly lose all of my signal. There is an “Assign” function button for the insert. It would be awesome if you could set a soft key to un-assign all inserts with one button as an emergency feature in the event of a computer crash. That way I could process the core stuff within the desk and not lose the whole thing while troubleshooting the PC.

[htevents]

+1

[Jos]

+1 — I would love to see this as a safety option for working with all kinds of outboard gear on the SQs. You never know when something will go pear-shaped on you, and being able to cut it out of the way with a button would be SUPER handy. At the very least, the ability to toggle the insert on a specific channel as a soft-key action would be a great addition, even if we can’t add a “globally remove all inserts” function.

It’s clumsy and hacky, but I’ve worked around this once or twice (when I had an inserted effect going that would cut off a channel’s output if it horked) by using a send/return without the insert. I had a vocal effect on a character for speech processing, and I was worried about the plugin going nuclear. So I had the actor’s mic go to a channel on the board that I then left muted, and then routed that channel’s pre-fader direct out to the plugin. Then I brought the plugin output back to the board on a separate channel. As a result, I had the “Bob-FX” channel on my working fader strip, and the “Bob-NP” (no plugin) channel on the layer above it, muted.

If the plugin failed, I could mute the effect channel and unmute the regular channel until I could put the plugin back in place. I had the layer with the “Bob-NP” channel set up to mirror the one with the “Bob-FX” channel on it, so I could work the show from the emergency layer until I had enough of a breather to slap the plugin back in place (generally by slapping the computer — percussive maintenance does the trick!).

On an SQ6 or SQ7 with plenty of soft keys, you could set a soft key to toggle the mute on the “Bob NP” channel so that you can flip to it lightning-quick and then swap layers and keep going. Obviously, this approach burns channels, but if you only need it for specific fail-safes it’s a good (if hacky) option.

[Hugh]

A kill button for failed external outboard gear seams to be a reasonable request. It certainly is not important to my workflow that deploys a Waves card to facilitate much stronger tie line inputs for my Digigrid/Waves LV1 recording system. My SQ5 with DX32 Prime I/Os are a perfect front end capture tools for my A/V project studio. For the acoustic Americana genre that is my forte, the Waves plug-ins are never needed with my SQ5 desk for SR management. Two mixing tracks in my DAW is where Waves plug-ins are great!
Hugh

[SQuser]

+1

[nottooloud]

What happens if you shutdown the inserted computer? I haven’t tried using inserts, so I don’t know. My request would be to pass audio if the insert is not found.

[yihaa!]

+1

I would like to use the built-in audio interface of the SQ mixer to insert VSTs. Came here to the forum to search for a fallback solution if external vst host fails..

Something like an global-insert-bypass on a SoftKey was my initial thought.

Maybe bypassing only inserts of a defined gang group would give more flexibility for some users..

[Author]

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