I have bought a pair of SPDIF to xlr cables so I can link to the digital in’s on the D-live, which buys me a couple of channels but am looking for a solution that will give me more options to fully utilise the Apollo x8. I have a couple of balanced TRS jack to xlr looms (one male xlr, one female) that I have been connecting the Apollo to the D-live surface with, but as I am utilising one of the local inputs for a talk-back mic I only have 5 inputs left to play with on the D-live. It’s been working well most of the time – especially when I had a rented c3500 for a run and didn’t have to plumb it in fresh every day! So far I have been using it mainly to insert into certain key channels (vocal and kick-drum) and onto my group buses on a large selection of house-desks. I have an Apollo x8 that I have been utilising live the past 6 months as a FOH touring engineer. There is NO documentation on this anywhere by the way. Mixers have enough other jobs to do these days. Otherwise you need a dedicated person to stand there half of the time to change keys and tweak things. Also, I personally have spent many hours discovering how to run AutoTune RealTime with MIDI. In this way you can route wet and dry signal wherever you need it.

You can then choose to either add plug ins to those channels or not.

Once you achieve your preferred method of getting signal into the UAD hardware (it often becomes confusing as to where to place the computer and we ended up needing two computers with screen sharing), use the UAD “console” app on your Mac to assign other mixer channels to the same input (if you’re using a twin or other small unit just create some virtual channels instead with the same input but you’ll probably have to get tricky with the output assignments). It’s best to view it as some kind of outboard gear with multiple outputs. We have been using UAD Apollo rack mounts and AutoTune RealTime extensively.

Easy uad autotune setting