Changes

The mixer or input tab of the control panel might not exist, depending on your specific interface. Some manufacturers rely on your DAW software to handle the routing listed here, which depending on your DAW, may or may not be available. It provides an additional layer of mixing/routing between your DAW's output and your interface's physical outputs, as well as allowing you to level and pan your physical inputs. The controls typically resembles resemble a [[Mixing Boards/Consoles|mixing board]]. This The page includes the '''physical inputs''' on your interface as well as '''software return inputs''' from your DAW which your DAW will see as ''outputs''. You can do standard mixer operations for each of them, like leveling, panning, muting, and soloing. Your DAW should automatically see all of your interface's physical inputs without having to change anything here, although you may have to add them inside your [[Computer Setup|DAW software's setup]]. Different interfaces will provide your DAW software with different numbers of virtual outputs, and again, you may have to set that up inside your DAW. Each input is likely to have a set of buttons that represent the available physical outputs. Routing a physical input directly to an output is called '''direct monitoring''' or '''hardware monitoring'''. The mixer page determines how software tells the interface to route the signal directly from input to output. This allows you to hear your playing without any latency - the signal does not have to be digitized, routed into the computer, processed by the DAW and/or the operating system, routed back to the physical interface, and converted back to analog. Routing the software return inputs are routed to outputs is what will allow you to hear the physical outputs output of your DAW software or other audio player software on the interfaceyour computer. Of course, you can often do more advanced things here, and it might be a little confusing at first. Let's look at a few examples.

Notice how the "Interface Mixer Settings" appear in the above examples - this determines how the DAW outputs (seen as ''software return inputs '' by the interface) are routed to the interface's physical outputs. In our examples, we have the mixer set to route software returns 1/2 to physical outputs 1/2 and software return 3/4 to physical outputs 3/4 (but we only use output 3 to feed the mono guitar amp).