Quick Start

Connect Your Console to an External I/O or Sound Card

MultiRack signal flow, to and from your console, is similar to hardware—some connections will be from aux sends on your console, with returns on the faders; others connections will be from channel inserts. You can also connect via a patch bay or router.

Create a Session and Set Preferences

A  Session is a collection of Racks, each of which contains plugin processors. A Session holds your setup design; I/O routing and levels; the number of Racks and plugins; their order and their settings. Normally, a Session will contain the setup for an entire show, while Snapshots are used to change settings between or within songs.

Add Racks and Set Signal Flow

A  Rack is a chain of plugins used to process audio signals, whether mono, stereo, or mono-to-stereo. With hardware, signals flow from a console’s channel insert or aux track, are processed with outboard gear, and then return to the console. MultiRack follows the same principle, except that processing takes place in virtual Racks filled with software plugins instead of hardware racks.

The first step in building a MultiRack processing setup is to create empty Racks, into which you load plugins. Set the input and output channels for the Racks you’ve created.

Add Plugins for Sound Processing

Once you’ve created Racks and assigned their I/O channels, it’s time to add plugins to each Rack. Each Rack can hold up to eight plugins, and the signal always flows from left-to-right. You can always rearrange the plugin order by clicking and dragging.

Create Snapshots for Easy Recall

Snapshots are used to save settings for songs and sections within songs. A Snapshot is sort of a “super preset,” a picture of all of the Racks in your Session. Snapshots are contained and saved as part of your Session file. A single Session file can contain up to 1000 Snapshots.

Organize Racks into Groups

Since each MultiRack Session can hold up to 64 Racks, you can organize similar Racks into groups to better manage your Session. Grouping Racks offers several advantages:

• You can group similar Racks together (such as all drum channels), and they will share a common group name.
• Groups are color-coded, making visual identification of similar Racks much easier.
• Since software processing can cause latency, you can align the latency per group.

Overview Window

Once you’ve loaded several Racks, you’ll want a convenient way to watch everything happening within your processing environment. The Overview Window displays a condensed view of each Rack, so you can keep an eye on the entire processing setup.