Going to USB microphones

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Bookstorecowboy

Guys, I will confess that apparently everything was fixable and then was fixed by doing a hardware reset of the Apollo. Why this should be necessary, I don't know, but I don't think I will forget again.

Glad you found a fix - this is often the cure for almost anything related to software. I haven't ever needed to do an explicit reset of my Apollo, but I do update the software every now and then when new releases come out, which I guess amounts to the same thing. I end up doing tech support for family and some friends, and probably 90% of the time, just telling them to reboot whatever device is giving them problems solves everything. That's just the unfortunate reality of software and firmware.

Console has come up several times here lately, and I'm not sure why people struggle with it, but I suspect it's because people feel like they are actually supposed to use it :-) What I mostly do with Console is turn on phantom power for the mic channels I'm using, set the gain, and then close it and forget all about it. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it.

I actually do use its routing features a bit, not for recording, but for a live-streaming, multiple camera webcam setup I have. That's a tiny bit more complex, but it's really not unlike a hardware mixer, so I find it pretty intuitive. Just like any mixer, but with the added ability to add plugins to the channels.

Anyway, glad it all worked out, I'm not even sure that going the USB route would be easier overall, there's still plenty of opportunities to have issues there.

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by Bookstorecowboy

Perhaps this kit should come with a very large warning that pops up every three months: "If you can't record a microphone but other stuff works, and you are going crazy trying to fix me, just do a hardware reset."

Yeah. I work for a large media company with really good gear and repair engineers to help. The first thing they always ask is, "Did you reboot?" I work with all this stuff and have learned to memorize the individual item's failure modes and means of restoring them to operation. For instance:

To my left I have a Euphonix MC Transport, a DAW transport controller with an alpha wheel and transport keys and soft keys. It is connected to the computer via Ethernet with its own fixed IP address. When it fails I can:
1. Restart the Euphonix computer software
2. Restart the DAW
3. Log out and log back into my user account
4. Reboot the computer
5. Restart the hardware unit

The first three are classed in order of what takes the least time to what takes the most time. Restoration of service can rest in any of these locations. When I am under a very short deadline I must balance off between whether trying the shortest or second shortest will take longer than simply rebooting the computer, because it takes less time to simply reboot than to go through the first four sequentially. Hilariously though, skipping to the reboot may remotely turn off the hardware unit, in which case you must restart the unit and then reboot AGAIN.

In the highest-stress situations, the worst case scenario of the bunch usually appears.

Bob

[dnf777]

Originally Posted by Bookstorecowboy

Guys, I will confess that apparently everything was fixable and then was fixed by doing a hardware reset of the Apollo. Why this should be necessary, I don't know, but I don't think I will forget again.
.

It was explained to me in a very watered down, caveman level way—almost anything with a chip involved runs an internal clock to coordinate functions. Depending on the amount of memory dedicated to the clock, it can only run so long before timing out. Some will just reset, but others will lock or get wonky. If devices are routinely left on, or keep their clocks running, they are more prone to needing reboots. Our wifi routers and roku tvs seem very susceptible…