m audio quattro and cubase/pro tools free, did i buy a pig in a blanket? Options

[gorillacake]

I just bought the m-audio quattro usb interface and I'm wondering, Uh, did I just buy a piece of crap? I've been hearing a lot of negative stuff but I got it for a good deal and i wanted something that had 1/4' and midi input so...
also, I was thinking about getting cubase but I'm wondering if I should just use pro tools free for now since I'm a beginner and my needs are pretty basic. My question is, will the m-audio quattro work with pro tools free? I should note that I have not received the quattro yet. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[olo23]

i don't know cubase, but luckily nuendo it so closely related i don't think they'd ever be able to marry each other, or have sex without producing children who play banjo. So I'll tell you how i'd troubleshoot this in nuendo and hopefully you can see some parallels in cubase.

first of all you get the quattro asio driver into the cubase asio folder just by copying it (or making an alias to the one in the reason folder). that's it. after that midi and audio will be happy to use the quattro in cubase.

next, look for a 'devices' menu item in cubase, and in there choose 'device setup'. in device setup go to the VST multitrack, where it will allow you to juggle output drivers. pup down the menu and it should now see your quattro asio driver (since you put it in cubase's folder).

Next, go back to the devices menu and in it you will likely see an item that says 'reason', select it, and it brings up a big list of channels, activate the ones you want (usually just 1&2/L&R unless you're bypassing the mixer in reason and using the mixing in cubase/nuendo (which i recommend further down the line).

Now you should be able to make a midi track in cubase, assign it to input from your controller, and output to something in reason, tickle the ivories and have reason react.

Now that the quattro is in the cubase asio folder you should also be able to drag in some audio files and have it play them back all shiny and happy.

As for where the sound manager comes into this, it doesn't really. it does if you don't have a quattro / D/A interface, as you would need to send reason and cubase out the built in sound manager to hear anything. However sqitching to use the quattro you also ease up load on the mac, so you'll likely notice significant processing and speed improvements once using the quattro.

another bonus of seperation between the quattro and sound manager is that you can route the quattro to one stereo strip on your mixer, and the regular mac sound out to another, crank up the quattro while you work and not have to worry about an apple error message, or mail recieved tone, jumping out at high volume and giving your heart a shake.

hope this helps, your mileage may vary.