Some hints for further refinement

Hi,

May I give Steinberg/Yamaha a few hints on the UR824? This thing is nearly perfect, and can do another, small step to become absolutely perfect.

  • The Power button is too bright when the interface is in standby. There is no real difference between on and off, and the only way to understand it is to see the clock indicator. Can you fix the firmware to make it a bit dimmer when turned off? The old idea of SJ of having the standby leds pulse at the human breath’s speed would be nice, too…

  • The horizontal scrollbar of the dspMixFx is only scrolling channel by channel, when clicking on the empty area of the scrollbar. It would be more useful (and more regular) if it jumped to the next block of channels, to quickly jump from Analog and Adat 1-8, to Adat 1-16.

  • The general appearance of the dspMixFX window is not very Mac-like. A few minimal touches would be enough to make it better integrate in the Mac UI: if you can’t use the system elements, at least you could change the title bar and the horizontal scrollbar to a darker color, with smoothed contours, a bit like in the windows shown in this page:
    http://www.macfordummies.it/recensioni/motion-5/1908.html

  • Having the dspMixFx window as a floating window would sometimes be nice. I personally prefer it is a solid window, that I can put next to my DAW’s other windows, but there are situations where I would be happy to work with the full DAW mixer shown, and the audio interface’s mixer ready to be grabbed in while sitting in the corner. Making it react quicker, when switching from another app, would also be nice (now, I notice a short gap when clicking on a dspMixFx fader while I’m in Logic).

  • MIDI control of the dspMixFx would be great. I know there is no MIDI interface on the UR (grrr…), but going around with a MacBook Air is not so bad. Connect both a control surface and the UR to the USB ports of the laptop, and you have a mixer with zero-latency monitoring ready.

  • Separate mono busses would be handy for stage monitor/headphone amps sends. Maybe this could be possible?

  • I would also love if the internal DSP could be accessed for processing recorded tracks, instead than only applied to the input channels.

Best,
Paolo

I guess this would not be so difficult to implement. Just add a MIDI input flow to dspMixFx, and you can connect any USB controller to the virtual mixer, and from there to the UR.

I would love to hear from Steinberg if something like this is planned, impossible to do, or too early to disclose. Having it would add a lot of value to this interface. It is the general trend, now, to double the audio input device as a standalone mixer.

Another useful addition would be a Talkback system, sending an input to a selected set of outputs (the stage/recorging room monitors) at the touch of a key.

Paolo