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So, this blog post will be a bit of a tangent from my normal content, but it is technical (more than it really should be, IMHO) and I'm hoping it will save some folks some of the hassle I encounter.
So, yesterday I purchased the TD-50 Digital Upgrade for my 15-year-old TD-20 Roland electronic drum set. Specifically, I want to record multi-track audio out of my set into Pro Tools for some new music I'm recording, and the TD-20... just wasn't up to that task. Well, at least as long as I continue using the Apollo Twin as the digital interface into my Macbook Pro and Pro Tools, as I certainly don't have 8+ audio inputs to take advantage of the separated audio outputs on the TD-20.
So, when you unbox the TD-50 and read through the instructions, it refers you to the Roland Support site to find the drivers you need for USB. However, going to that site - the information is not readily apparent. It appears that, right now, the best bet is to simply click on TD-50 and follow it, at which point various drivers are visible for various computers.
I'm running 10.15.6, so I'm going to go with the 10.15 driver and hope for the best! The instructions say to disconnect ALL USB except keyboard and mouse (which are built into my Macbook), so I do that first. I read ahead in the instructions and see that it says I will need to have the TD-50 plugged in later (after restart) and that I need to have the USB mode on the TD-50 set to Vendor - so I elect to set it to vendor in advance.
On the TD-50, this means clicking Setup, F2, down arrow 4 times, +, Enter, Exit, Exit - and then powering off the TD-50.
Now I run the installer. The only counterintuitive part is that they want you just to accept (by clicking "OK") the security warning that is shown at this point, in order to fix it after restarting. So, I follow those instructions, the installer finishes, and I let it restart my system.
After restarting, a plug a cable into my TD-50 and into an USB-B to USB-C adapter, then I plug that adapter into my computer and turn on the TD-50. Nothing happens. This is a bit concerning. Maybe the adapter is interfering somehow or another? I can't be sure.
I proceed to the instructions that show me how to resolve the driver blockage and ( Settings > Security & Privacy > General > (Unlock Padlock) > Allow (next to the Roland message) ), then restart the TD-50, to see if that makes any difference. Still nothing.
In positive news, if I go to "Sound" under System Preferences, I *do* see the TD-50 listed on all 3 tabs...
The instructions want me to set the TD-50 on all three of these screens. It creates the question in my mind: if I do this, where will my music from Pro Tools wind up? Should I try this and this just start Pro Tools and see?
I had earlier seen a video from Nick D'Virgilio, so I decide to rewatch that for some clues. He advised going into Setup > Output > Direct and... maybe making some adjustments? But, it isn't clear to me what adjustments I'd need to make - so... I'm leaving that for the moment.
The next thing he's showing is having tracks set to take in audio from the individual drums, so let me start with that. I launch Pro Tools and a song I'm building for which I need to record drum tracks. Upon startup, of course it warns me that it can't find a bunch of the channels I previously had, so - I shut down Pro Tools (telling it NOT to save changes to my song), plug my Apollo Twin back in and restart Pro Tools. I guess we'll see if it can do my TD-50 and Apollo Twin at the same time. (Should the Apollo Twin maybe have a USB input?)
Restarting Pro Tools shows the same issue. I've seen this before when I've made a mistake. I reboot my Macbook Pro and hope.
I have the same problems. So, I go into Setup > Hardware in Pro Tools, which is where I think I have solved this problem before, and (interestingly) all I see listed there is the TD-50.
Given this situation... I'm thinking I should go ahead and make the adjustments to put everything to TD-50 under Settings > Sound on my Macbook that were originally suggested. So, I shut down Pro Tools, do that and then retry Pro Tools... this time with a brand new song.
So, no errors on startup. I go to the Setup menu again and this time I see the "Playback Engine" option. I click that and see that the Playback Engine has changed to the TD50.
So, on this basis, it doesn't come as a total surprise that when I go back to watch more of the YouTube video, it doesn't play through my Mac speaker but, when I plug my headphones into the TD-50... there it is! This is, after all, what I basically just set up through the Mac's Settings.
What is confusing is that when I add a track to Pro Tools and go to the Mix window to try to assign a channel from the TD-50... it isn't there.
I guess I'll try running that Pro Tools > Hardware> Setup after all.
This is ugly. TD-50... 10 ins and 4 outs? I would have thought it had 10 outs, because that's how many audio channels it is supposed to do. And, does this all mean I have to choose between Pro Tools output and TD-50?
I like this one much better! I can't explain why "Universal Audio Thunderbolt" isn't selected - since I've been using it for over 3 months at this point - but... let me try selecting both that and the TD-50 and see if that impacts my ProTools channel options at all!
Hmmm... it looks like whatever order I select them in determines the internal channels to which the external channels are mapped. I can either have the Thunderbolt get the lowest channel numbers or the TD-50 get that. I'll try Thunderbolt first and see how that plays out.
I close all of the above and go back to Pro Tools, telling it to use the Pro Tools Aggregate I/O for playback. I'm hoping this will allow me to use both at once... maybe everything going through the phones on my Apollo Twin? Changing this forces Pro Tools to close, so I reopen it.
OK -- finally... a bit of a break through! I realize that the track I already had was expecting to only have the inputs from the Apollo Twin, because that was the only thing configured when it was created. I go in to Setup > I/O in the Pro Tools Hardware menu and tell it to set up Stereo Defaults, and now I get all my additional channels! However, I'm not sure about having these odd pairings of drums - Kick and Snare being different sides of one stereo track... seems to me like they should be individual mono channels. So, I redo it using Mono.
Now, when I go into my new track, I am able to choose Channel 22 (Channel 19 & 20 being the aggregate mix and 21 being the snare) and - once I enable record on the new track - I can see it receiving signal when I hit the snare. I simply can't figure out how to hear it at this point.
After a great deal more troubleshooting, the culprit turned out to be "Low Latency Monitoring". Once I turned this off in Pro Tools (by going to Options > Low Latency Monitoring), I was finally able to hear my snare drum as I played it.
But there is one issue left. When I was futzing around above, choosing to do a 100% Mono set of defaults turns out not to have been a wise choice. Trying to load any of my existing songs at this point, caused them all to be unable to find inputs, because all my audio in them was Stereo - which is probably a better choice for things like keyboards, anyhow.
So, I rectify this by going back into I/O setup in Pro Tools and choosing "Stereo" for "Default Format" and clicking Default. I go back into my tracks now and choose "Mic/Line/Mon" for all of the Inputs and add a new Mono track to see how that works. This allows me to choose track 22 by itself for just my snare. I play it and I'm able to hear both on audition and playback!
About 3 minutes into my first recording attempt with 8 drum tracks at once against the rest of my music, the system crashed. As per its suggestion, I increased the "H/W Buffer Size" to 256 samples under Setup > Playback Engine in Pro Tools. Sadly, it crashed again. So, I increased it to 512 samples (this is beginning to sound a little like Monty Python's Holy Grail with the castle that sank into the swamp).
And this time - I was able to record it all.
So there you have it... Pro Tools - a piece of software that just may be more complicated than most programming languages I've learned. :-)