Worry not young Jedi. The pitfalls are many but the rewards are legion! Or maybe it's the other around. Just make sure you keep that lightsaber handy, and don't forget to change the battery once in a while, nothing worse than facing a Sith Lord with a dead saber (of course, they never show that in the movies!@#)
So basically, the MIDI part is what I showed in my other post. The Audio part will look something like this:
About the most basic setup you can get. The Scope Analog Source and Dest are the audio inputs of the card (yours will probably be PulsarII or whatnot,) and they're in the Hardware IO section. The ASIO2 devices (for some reason, the ASIO1 devices aren't stable) are the audio streams to and from the sequencer (or whatever software is using the ASIO drivers.) These devices are in the Software IO section. You can use 16bit ones if you want, I've just used the 24bit ones for this example.
This setup will take audio from the analog input, and send it to your sequencer, where you can record it (that's the top part.) The other connection will take audio from your sequencer and send it to the analog output, so that you can hear what's going on.
To get more channels in and out of your sequencer, you can double-click either ASIO2 devices and a little window will show up that will let you adjust the number of ins and outs. Now you can take all those outputs and shove them in a mixer and go straight to heaven! Or anything else you might want/imagine. Multiple ASIO inputs will let you record a bunch of tracks at the same time in the sequencer (not a necessity, but always fun.)
You can also use the Wave Source and Wave Dest drivers (standard WDM drivers) to record stuff in SoundForge/Cooledit/Audacity/etc.
As for XTC, it's a bit tricky to use, but do-able. First of all, you need to tick the Enable XTC Mode in the Settings window of SFP. Then you need to close SFP, and then (yes, that's alot of "then"s ^_^) open the sequencer. If you don't hear any sound, try changing which output your track uses in the sequencer (I can explain this for Logic, no idea how Cubase works.)
About the plugins, the XTC plugins are the same ones that are available in the SFP environement. In fact, more are available in SFP as not all plugins are XTC-compatible, most of the free plugins aren't, and you're definitely going to want to use some of them
Using both native and DSP plugin is quite possible, tho, so it's mostly a matter of how you prefer to work.
That's it for first lesson! So yeah, the manual might be a good start to learn more about the intricacies of the routing stuff, but it's more than 110% worth your while. You'll never look back! Especially not after lesson two: 360 Perceptual Field and Mixdown Using the Force!
