USB volume to Thumb drive

[AudioGuy]

Should be easy but cannot locate documentation on A&H website tutorials or YouTube. How do you adjust the volume when recording to a USB thumb from a QU-32? The recording itself comes through but the volume is weak. We amplify the channels in an audio editor. Our church switched to a QU-32 and output services to a CD for distribution. That works fine. As a backup we also record to a USB thumb drive but the volume is too low.

[Dancing Brook]

Trim I believe is the only adjustment. Raw audio of every channel.

[Giga]

Yep, “channel direct out trim” is what you’re looking for. I tend to record lowish to the thumbdrive, better to have to raise the level in your DAW than to have an overloaded recording.

Good luck !

Giga

[garyh]

What I’ve been doing is use Audacity to normalize all the tracks to -1db before loading them in my DAW.

[AudioGuy]

Thanks guys but we’re kinda new at this. Don’t understand trim. We’ll figure it out.

[AlanG]

I deal with a Qu-Pac in the local church, and was not born at a sound desk, but maybe I can help you. “clever Experts”feel free to correct me.

Firstly, Audio Guy, download a copy of the Q manual (latest version) from the Allen & Heath web-site. It includes all Q mixers and was written by an expert, so its got stuff you may not understand <g> but if you think hard it could help.

Recording to a USB stick (or a mobile hard drive) must be to a fast USB ,If you have a bog-standard one it will not work fast enough & stuff will be lost. A & H have a list of tried & recommended USB sticks on their support web-site.

Page 52 of the manual has a section on Stereo Recording and you can see that the to-be-recording is fed into inputs 17 & 18 and you can choose the input from different points on the input paths.

Page 29 tells you how to set the “trim” on the input.

Page 38 tells you how to set the trim if you use “Direct Outputs” as your recording input.

Note that recorded audio comes out as 48kHz 24bit Stereo samples not the usual 44.1KHz 16bit Stereo. This difference will be adapted to by any modern player but an old CD player may choke. A bigger issue is that the recording is much, much bigger & a CD would hold only about 5 minutes. So the recording must be converted. But you may have learnt this already’

Best of Luck

AlanG

[Mike C]

I assume you are just recording or want to record just the main stereo
output as in straight stereo recording to the USB stick.

To give you some independent level adjustment there are a couple ways to do it, both will require going into the I/O set up menu.

– In the IO output setup menu select one of the Matrix outputs to send to the USB.
Go to that matrix output mix screen and select L R pre, bring up that level to at
least 0db. That matrix master fader will now control the level to the USB stereo recording. You can monitor the stereo record level on the USB screen.
You can also add processing to the stereo recording at the matrix out put.

– Another way is to use one of the mixes to feed the USB stereo recording, we’ll use
mix 1 for example, go to the IO set up, select mix 1 to feed both channels of the USB.
Select mix 1 and set it to post fade and post all, now on every channel turn up mix 1
to unity. On the spoken word only channels, like the pastor, readers, ect run mix 1
on those channel a little higher.

The mix 1 master will control the recording level and you can apply over all processing the to recording if needed.

Using a separate mix to feed the recording will allow you to somewhat customize the
recorded mix from the main house mix.

Being that the mix is set to post fade it will still track what your doing in the
house mix but you will be able to bring channels that run lower in the house mix up
in the recording mix. I would help to have someone use headphones and monitor the recording mix while your recording and at least make some initial adjustments.
They could be using an iPad to adjust the recording while someone else mixes the service.

[AudioGuy]

Mike. Thanks very much for your detail instructions. I think we got it now.

[Author]

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