Beginner question on audio interfaces and setup

I'm a little new forgive if this seems like a silly question, and I've also been told that I never ask short questions so please also forgive if this is longwinded. A year ago I bought a cheap Baldwin organ on eBay with the intention of learning organ to play for my church. Since discovering it didn't work, I learned about Hauptwerk and have spent a year putting together what is now a 4-manual organ w/ pedals, which currently plays very well.

For my setup I initially got a motu midi express 128 so that I could have a large number of midi inputs, since two of my manuals were just UMX-610s and couldn't daisy chain, and the rest of the setup required two more midi cables (total of four cables at the moment running). However at the time I also got an audio interface (an RME fireface 800, used off eBay), because I thought (perhaps naively) that it was necessary. I wasn't able to set it up and use it with my computer, though, and I’ve been practicing using headphones from my laptop’s jack, and the midi interface only.

I've recently been able to upgrade my laptop so that I can now (finally) connect firewire and use the RME interface, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting it to work. My understanding of its purpose may be flawed, but as I understand the advantage to having an audio interface in general is to:

1) mix audio inputs from several sources (which is not necessary for a Hauptwerk setup),
2) output high quality audio at low latency and
3) run output on multiple channels (if running into a large speaker setup).

I would certainly be happier to have higher quality audio, and it would be nice to connect the audio into my home speaker setup (possibly through my AV receiver, if that's realistic). Currently trying to route sound from my headphone jack in to my receiver (via a 3.5mm to RCA cable adapter) yields sound that is rather poor. So it's hard to let other people hear when I practice.

Is my understanding of the purpose of the audio interface correct? Is there any other reason to have it, rather than just running the devices through a midi-interface alone and just using computer’s headphone jack? How much of an improvement is there to audio quality? And are there any good resources to learn how to set it up so that I can get output from it? I've looked through the documentation for the ff800 (which seems to assume, not unreasonably, that the user has more knowledge and understanding of audio interfaces than I do), I’ve searched online for tutorials, and I’m having no luck figuring out how to run my sound out of the ff800 instead of the laptop's headphone jack. I'm running the latest Hauptwerk on a new Macbook Pro, and I've been able to get the ff800 connected and recognized by the system, but I can't figure out any way in the system settings or the ff800 settings to run output from it.

If anyone out there has experience setting up the ff800 on a Mac, or in general just has a wealth of knowledge about audio interfaces and their setups and a desire to pass along knowledge, I would be grateful for any advice or helpful resources/links to learn from.

[mdyde]

Hello kaxlen,

1) mix audio inputs from several sources (which is not necessary for a Hauptwerk setup),
2) output high quality audio at low latency and
3) run output on multiple channels (if running into a large speaker setup).

Yes -- that's probably a fair summary. On Windows/PCs it's usually necessary to use a dedicated pro/semi-pro audio interface in order to get good real-time/low-latency audio performance, but on Macs performance isn't a consideration in itself since OS X has high-performance professional-quality audio and MIDI drivers built in, so a Mac's built-in/headphones output will perform just as well (but your RME interface should still give noticeably better audio quality).

This document (linked to from the 'Support | Requirements' section of the website) has more details on audio interfaces in general: https://www.hauptwerk.com/clientuploads ... rdware.pdf

Our experience of RME interfaces has been very positive (in terms of quality, reliability, drivers, support, etc.), so we particularly recommend them. I have an RME Fireface UFX. I don't have first-hand experience with the Fireface 800, but I believe it to be very similar (effectively the predecessor of the UFX).

I'd suggest:

- Exit Hauptwerk if it's running.

- Make sure that you have the latest driver for the FF 800 installed. Check for the latest version on RME's website.

- Also make sure that you have its latest firmware installed (also available on RME's website).

- Reboot both the Mac and the FF 800 if you changed anything.

- Launch Hauptwerk.

- On Hauptwerk's 'General settings | Audio outputs' screen, select the Fireface as the audio output device, and the desired pair of the RME's analogue output channels. For example, with my UFX, I could select '001: Analog 1-8 [Analog 1]' for the left channel, and '002: Analog 1-8 [Analog 2]' for the right.

Does that make it work properly?

Wow, I'm amazed at how incredibly simple that solution was. My face is red.

I didn't realize that the issue was application specific. I was looking for a magic switch in the system settings that would start routing all sound into the output of the interface rather than the built in headphone jack, or (more terrifying) perhaps some combination of switches on the interface and/or its settings app. The Hauptwerk settings did the trick, it's playing great now, and I have to say that there is a noticeable improvement in the quality with the interface, though the headphone jack still gives decent audio. It's most noticeable with large registrations or deep bass on the pedal.

Thank you for the help! I still feel like I have a lot to learn about this device, though. It feels sad to basically just be using it as a really nice headphone jack, since I know it probably has some very impressive capabilities which I will never even figure out, let alone use.

[mdyde]

Thanks. Excellent. Glad to hear it turned out to be simple!