Gday all
I’m using Ableton/ AbleSet through a cymatic audio utrack24. I’m wanting to start using Ableset’s redundancy feature but the utrack only has one audio in port. Is there a way to make this work having two laptops into the one interface or would I need either a play audio12 or second interface?
Cheers
Hey Adam!
Short answer: unfortunately, the Cymatic uTrack24 doesn’t offer redundant playback.
The uTrack24 is a great, very flexible unit, but it can only be connected to one computer at a time, so there’s no way to feed two laptops into it and have automatic failover between them.
It does have a nice fallback option in that you can run a set directly from a USB thumb drive without a computer at all — but in that scenario Ableton and AbleSet are out of the equation, which I’m assuming isn’t what you’re aiming for.
If your goal is proper redundancy with two laptops running Ableton + AbleSet, you’d need an interface designed for redundant playback, like the iConnectivity PlayAUDIO12 or the newer PlayAUDIO1U.
Since Cymatic as a company is no longer active and doesn’t provide ongoing support or firmware updates, it’s also worth considering this from a future-proofing point of view. The uTrack24 is a great interface, but without active support, moving to a currently supported platform like iConnectivity can be a safer choice going forward.
Hope that helps clarify things!
Thank you!
Yeah I was pretty sure that would be the case but thought it’d be worth checking if there was some sort of work around.
yeah it’s a shame they went out of business it’s a great product. I actually started using ableton because cymatic’s program to format tracks was getting extremely laggy and sometimes not working for some tracks. Hence why I’m just using it as an interface.
thank you for your help!
Secondary question, my sound engineer told me I should use waves virtual sound check as an interface on each computer and then I can send him an Ethernet straight to his waves port. I’ve not been able to find anyone running playback like this, so I’m thinking there must be a reason. Anyone have any experience with this?
Cheers
I think the main reason would be that, depending on the mixer your sound engineer is using, you likely won’t have automatic fallback in case one of the computers fails.
If your sound engineer is fine with receiving digital audio, you could also run Dante Virtual Soundcard on both computers and connect it to an EXBOX.MD or Core256 which would take care of the automatic redundancy.
You can then give your sound engineer an Ethernet cable that they can use to access all channels.
It’s definitely a more expensive solution compared to the PlayAUDIO devices, but depending on your setup, it could give you more flexibility and higher channel counts.
I hope this helps! 
Ah yes I understand!
That makes sense.
Thank you for your help!