Headed down to the Caribbean with Sol Driven Train for our 10th annual tour. We're traveling with a Behringer XR18. I've got a dedicated laptop with Waves Tracks Live for recording.
Can anybody give me some feedback on how I might want to have the USB outputs configured (Analog, Analog + Mutes, Input, Input + Mutes, etc)? Bonus points for too much information, opinions, real world experiences. Thank you!
I have used this exact setup to record festival sets and band sessions.
For festival sets I pull in a pair of on-stage mics, the FOH mix, Audience mics and often a subgroups of vocals and/or instrument mixes. I have the XR18 connected to a rack mounted mac mini with USB and Tracks Live is set to record each channel individually (8 to 10 channels). In post, I drop the wavs into Reaper, time align the audience mics and mix.
This setup pulls in the channel input and gain settings, not the mix settings. You could setup Tracks live to record the main mix tracks or specific busses, but for this I am just pulling in each track "pre-fader" to work with later. If you have your gain structure right for each channel mixing in post is pretty painless.
For sessions I have all instruments pulled into the XR18. Tracks live records the individual channels, not the mix. The main mix and bus mixes are being used for headphone monitoring by the musicians and me.
If you are on a mac, I could probably take a screenshot of my XR-18 routing and Tracks Live settings, but it is pretty basic. The XR-18 is a surprisingly nice 18 channel interface.
Be sure to have the X-Air-Edit app on your laptop to adjust your settings. Also use an ethernet cable (in addition to the USB) to connect the laptop to the XR-18 so you don't have any lag or glitches controlling the unit.