Zoom LiveTrak L-8: Setting it up with Audition and Garageband

All right guys, so this is a follow-up video to my previous one where I reviewed the Zoom L8 when I received it, hadn't used it at that point, but showed you what I absolutely loved about it. Since then, I have been using it not only here in my office studio but actually on the road doing some recording of podcasts. One of the comments and questions was, hey, can you show us how you have it set up and how you've integrated it with your computer for Adobe Audition and also GarageBand? So what I'm going to be doing is showing you how I have this integrated with the computer in both those platforms. Now, I don't use GarageBand. I use Adobe Audition. So we're going to do that one first, and then I'm going to get GarageBand installed on the computer, and I'll show you how that setting setup will work. So let's get started here. So what we see here on the screen, and I'm just reviewing the audio levels here, but once you go ahead and install the driver for the Zoom L-8, so what you're going to do is you're going to go to the Zoom website. You're going to look up the L-8. You're going to go to support, and it's going to give you the driver for your computer, whether it's PC or Mac, and the version that you have. So once that's installed, that's the first thing you need to do. A lot of times people don't do that, and they wonder why it's not configuring with their computer. So with Audition, once you've got it set up, you're going to go to preferences. Now I'm on a Mac, just to preface that. We're going to go to audio hardware. Now in here, I've already got it set for Zoom L-8, and you're going to do your input and your output. So So you can have your input being from anything else, but in most cases, you're going to have it coming from here. Now, if you have your monitors or headphones plugged into your computer and you don't want to run it back through the mixer, you can have your output going to your built-in driver, but I have them both going in here because it works really well. Now, once we're doing that, what we're going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and record a clip. So I'm going to create a new audio file. We'll just make it a test. Here it is. And we're just gonna do a quick recording. Hey, it's Shaun here, and this is my test audio recording coming from the Zoom L-8 into Adobe Audition. Now, we notice on the board here that if the level's too low, we can actually turn up the gain here to bring it up and down. Now, because it's coming in through that input, I am not actually going to need to adjust the audio level here on the fader.. It's going to come in, coming in through the gain, which works really well for me for recording this way. Okay, now what I can do is I can go ahead and I look through the channel that has USB selected here on the top. So in this case, it's channel 7, and that's going to be the computer playback channel. So if I wanted to hear that in the monitors here in my studio, I actually have 2 of the headphone inputs going out to the monitor at the top. I can turn them up and turn them down depending on what the audio level is. So then you can hear the audio coming back through the actual recording. So that's what we wanted to make sure was that it was doing that, okay? Just based on that control right there. Now here's the other cool thing that is great with Adobe Audition. If we go to multitrack mode, and because we've got the driver installed, we can actually assign in the multitrack here for the input, any of the inputs here. So you can do input 1 for that channel, input 2 for that channel, and that's really where you get the individual channels here, the power of it. Your fader controls are only for your outputting of your board to either speakers or to, if you're doing a master record on the device here, you're really going to be using your interface to do the level recording in here. Obviously, your gains are going to control that. So that's a great way to have that control of recording directly to the system. Okay, so here we are over in GarageBand, and I will admit, not a GarageBand expert. I hardly use it, obviously just playing around with it when it first came out and trying to become a musician, which I'm not, and this tool did not make me a musician. So I, I tend to stay with Adobe Audition, but you guys asked me to show you what the L-8 can do with GarageBand, and this is based on what I was able to figure out with it. So again, just to reiterate, the driver is installed on your computer for the L-8. Now open up GarageBand here, and then obviously you can pick one of the track types that you see here on the screen. And then down below where it says input type, you've got the different inputs, right, which are going to correspond to different inputs that are coming through, um, on your actual L-8. So that being said, if I was to go ahead and choose input 1 and then I can say create, then I can see my levels are here. I could hit record and I'm going to be then recording the audio that is coming in through my L-8. And again, you don't need to have the faders up. It's going to take the input. If you want to adjust the levels into the board, you got to use the gain just like you do in Audition. Now, the one downfall that I've found with this, and I'll show you here, I'm just going to stop this, is if I was going to go ahead and add, you know, let's say input 2, which ultimately should be the second channel on the board. Okay, so if I go ahead and do that, watch what happens. It's still reading— I only have one input into my board in channel 1, but it's still reading it now as input 2. So there's a little bit of a glitch there with the driver and how it's resonating with it. So what I suggest is— or not suggest, but what I'm going to point out is the fact that you can't have true, or I haven't been able to figure out a true multi-track recording using GarageBand and the L8 right now. I don't know if an update's gonna come out that's gonna fix that, but if you have been able to figure that out, then by all means, please let me know. Because even though I checked this here, it says down here, recording settings, it says L8 II, which is not. Now watch this. If I choose 5, the audio goes away, right? So for some reason, right? So I would obviously have to go move through the channels and figure out what that is. I'm not going to do that in this, so I'm not going to worry about that part of it. So just to let you know, that's the limitations with it. Again, I am more versed in Audition than I am GarageBand, so take this at, uh, you know, with a grain of salt and, um, do what you want with it. And have some great times recording your podcast, recording whatever it is that you do. But it does work really, really well with Adobe Audition. So in closing, if you liked this video and you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do so. Love the love coming through. Put your comments in. I don't necessarily monitor them daily, but I do go back and check almost weekly and will respond to any questions you have or any suggestions you have with the videos. Put them in there. I'd be happy to hear them. Anyway, thanks, thanks, and have a great day.