Fixing a UCA200 Audio Interface
If you’re anything like me, you ran across the sub-$250 Behringer analog mixers and thought to yourself “Hot damn, there’s something I could use… oh, AND it has a USB interface, rock on!”
Unfortunately, that interface is only 2 channels, but that’s another story.
I recently had the bad luck to have it stop working for me on Mac OS X under Logic, Live, *AND* Audacity - that’s right, 3 out of 3 professional audio capture and editing applications couldn’t fix it. The input recorded fine, but trying to live monitor over the same interface sounded really distorted. Vocals came across okay, but guitar was completely trashed.
After trying various different things, including unplugging the damn thing, and using a different USB port, turning off airport, and even disabling the “nap” feature of my Power PC G5 processor (a *constant* source of audio noise on line-out, btw…), nothing worked.
Finally, I stumbled across this little gem: Audio MIDI Setup.
It will be located in your Applications > Utilities folder, and looks like a keyboard (I’d upload an image, but my laptop crashed the other day - got no FTP client, nor my login keychain..).
Double click on that guy to launch it.
Go down to the “Properties For:” pop-up button, and select “USB Audio CODEC.” Now, check the “Audio Output” box - you should see it set as 2ch - 8bit. That’s the problem! Sometimes, especially when trying to use the interface from more than one app at once (apparently a big no-no), it resets itself to 8-bits.
Just flip that switch to 2ch - 16bit and you’re good to go.
Hope this helps some people!
on March 19th, 2008 at 1:27 am
[...] Here’s my workaround: Fixing a UCA200 Audio Interface digg_url = ‘http://blog.ryandubois.net/archives/2008/03/19/fixing-a-broken-uca200/’; digg_title = ‘Fixing a broken UCA200′; digg_bgcolor = ‘#EEEEEE’; digg_skin = ‘compact’; digg_window = ‘new’; [...]