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5. How to route system audio back into your DAW

1 Many audio interfaces now feature the ability to easily record system audio directly into your DAW – let’s run through the process. First, use your interface’s internal software mixer to patch your main system audio mix to a virtual ‘loopback’ input; we’ve set ours to receive the audio directly from the main monitoring path.

2 We can now open our DAW and set up an additional input bus with Loop 1 and 2 as the inputs; this routing will let us record our system audio onto a fresh channel. After assigning the relevant input bus to a stereo audio track, we can test our loopback by loading up YouTube in any web browser and searching for ComputerMusic.

3 Here, we’ve picked out a classic video of DnB don TC showing off some drum chopping skills, and recorded some of the dialogue straight into our DAW ready for sampling later. We’ve used Cubase Pro 9.5 and a Focusrite Saffire on macOS for this tutorial, but this technique can, of course, equally be applied to a wide range of other equipment.