#21

Hi, been lurking here for a few months, first time commenter. When I saw a Kmix thread I figured I’d finally make an account to give my input :slight_smile:

I’m overall pretty happy with mine. One thing I’ve noticed is that the audio interface sometimes introduces horrible noise. I assume this is related to usb ground interference, in some applications I’ve been able to fix it simply by using a cable with a ferrite bead, in others I have not. I have one project with a friend who uses ableton but he needs a USB hub (to connect my mixer, his push, some lights via dmx) and we have yet to solve the ground / noise issues. Considering I think the price is really only justifiable if you view it as a mixer AND an interface this has been quite annoying to me.

That said, with other projects I’ve had no issue using the interface portion though. Just last week I played a show with two friends where the kmix was our main mixer going to the PA. Fifteen minutes before the show we decided we might as well record the show too since we could get multi-channel audio straight into a DAW. The recordings came out pristine (without any of the noise I mentioned above) and we had a recording of our performance out two days after the show. That was definitely satisfying!

As far as using it as a mixer, I use one fx send (on inputs 7/8) with 2 stereo inputs and 2 mono inputs. Channels 1/2 can be tough to use with line level gear because they have different pre-amps and the gain can’t go as low. Definitely don’t try and use channels 1/2 for modular level gear. As mentioned above, the faders are not exactly smooth. I would never bring parts in and out in a live situation using the kmix faders, but I generally have some other volume / vca control in my path before it gets to the kmix where I can control accordingly.

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#22

That’s what I do as well, but of course, when you don’t remember what you set them to, and and just touch the faders somewhere, the level usually jumps.

I can’t remember reading about a pickup mode in the manual, how does it work?

maybe related to this: https://support.keithmcmillen.com/hc/en-us/articles/218345423-I-m-having-audio-distortion-dropouts-degradation-when-using-my-K-Mix-on-Mac-OS-X-Is-it-broken-
or to this: http://cdm.link/2019/02/apple-2018-glitch/

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#23

It’s in the editor preferences, so set from the computer:

" 0. Two switches that enable/disable “Pass Thru” for the faders and/or rotaries. With the lack of traditional knobs or faders, K-Mix allows
you to make discontinuous jumps; if you want to jump from
11 to 127 you don’t have to move the faders through every
value in-between. This can be very useful in some situations, but could be less than desirable for some people.

Pass Thru is meant to solve this. When both are enabled, faders and rotaries will not move until your finger “passes through” the current value. This will prevent any discontinuous jumps that may occur otherwise. You can enable pass thru for faders and rotaries separately if you prefer. Other software/hardware may sometimes refer to this functionality as fader “takeover”."

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#24

Thanks for the links. Maybe the issue is an unpowered (or just underpowered) USB hub. I’ll also see if my bandmate can check on his mac OS version.

#25

Anyone have issues with powering up? I often have trouble with mine when I turn it off then power it up again. It freezes and I have to unplug and repower up, sometimes multiple times. Happens pretty much every time I take mine to play a show and totally freaks me out. It always eventually works, but it’s a bit panic inducing.

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#26

I love my kmix! A super flexible all in one.

Just hoping some of you can help me wrap my head around the input and output section. I thought I had a solid understanding of the PRE/POST Input/Output section using the mixer with my DAW until I starting using it to live stream. Input wise, does pre represent the signal before passing through the kmix?

Edit: I figured out the correct settings after some tinkering, but It only further muddles my understanding of the section’s settings

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#27

I love mine. Nothing like it, I wish there were more options. One of my rotaries has never worked properly, it gets stuck. I emailed KM when I first got it, but they were busy with NAMM stuff and I never followed up.
It works great for what I need it to do. Compact, multi in, multi out. Works well with AUM on iOS as well. I can send any physical KMIX channel to a channel in AUM and then run AU effects on that audio. You can route out to individual outs, too.
I wish the lights were brighter, but I’m surprised it works with as many things going on as it does via USB power.
I have used it to control MIDI visual software like CoGe or Lumen while doing live audio, and it works well for that.

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#28

Thanks for the pointer! For some reason my mind had ignored that part. Maybe because “pass through” is a weird terminology or maybe it’s my subconscious rejection for pickup modes. I’m not sure if the annoyance of pickup mode will really be worth it, but I’ll try it out.
Actually the whole issue would have been easily solvable by adding some sort of “slew mode” instead of pickup.

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#29

@secretrow in the meantime I have set a spare eeepc to work as a multitrack recorder with the k-mix. I use Ardour via ALSA and so far recording all 8 teacks works totally fine.
It’s a poorly specced netbook I have, with little ram and a slow mechanical HD but works fine nonetheless. So far I have not felt the need to use the editor, though it would be convenient to have I guess.

Regarding the VU vs faders thing. It’s actually a lot less of a problem than what I thought, once you get used to it. If you keep a bit of headroom and set things up properly beforehand you don’t need to see the VUs all the time anyway.

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#30

A couple of notes on the K-mix, which might be useful if you happen to get one.

I’m using it on a PC running Windows 7 now. It’s working fine, but of course you need to install the ASIO driver. The only glitch I’ve noticed is that you need to manually set the audio output resolution to something like 44.1 or 48Khz or most “normal” applications like VLC or Foobar won’t run (VLC kept crashing, Foobar would not make any sound).
The reason is that the driver defaults to 96Khz, and many applications don’t support that.
Now, setting the audio resolution can be tricky. Initially I found that I couldn’t, the dropdown was greyed out and locked. Only after starting Reaper and setting it to “request the resolution of 44.1Khz” the drodown became active. Not really sure what happened, but the workaround might work with any DAW.

Some more notes on my experience with the K-Mix so far.

  • It’s great as a multi-channel audio interface with some more hands-on control! You can route things in and out of it in a very flexible manner!
  • It’s a bit weird that you cannot route the audio to the computer “post fader”. The K-Mix will always ignore the fader position and hence when you record your input it will always be at a steady, full volume. I can see the pros and cons to that, but having some more options would have been nice. right now I have to redo all the fade-ins and outs in the DAW after recording.
  • Gain staging is a bit more complicated than expected, mostly because if you overdrive the input you only see it in the TRIM page. This means you have to do lots of back&forth between pages, or keep levels reasonably low. Also, there doesn’t seem to be much headroom.
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#31

I might be in the weeds with this, but isn’t there a page for setting this in the K-Mix utility?

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#32

I’d also preferred if it had internal Sidechaining. That would’ve been so useful. I requested it way back but it was never implemented.

#33

I did try both PRE and POST in the editor, but it seems that the signal that is sent to the computer is always pre fader. POST just routes the signal through the FX I think.

#34

As far as I can remember, there was something about that page that kept throwing me for a loop – it might’ve been that very thing. Darn.

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#35

pretty sure i send post fader to my computer. I record live multitrack jams with fades and everything using the k-mix.

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#36

Yes but you’re just using the computer interface for the standalone mixer, not the kmix as a soundcard though right?

#37

k-mix is my audio interface via USB into my laptop…

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#38

Ah cool ! I’m yet to use it as a soundcard, nice to know it keeps fader use capacity. I’ll probably give it a go at some point.

#39

I finally figured it out, but it needs a bit of “wrapping your head around things”.
When you set the USB option for a channel’s input to POST what it does is that the k-mix will no longer send the audio that goes into input N to the computer, instead it will send what goes out from output N.
So to be able to record stuff post-fader and post-fx you need to set the k-mix up so that each input channel is mapped to an output channel (i.e. in 1 and 2 to main, 2 and 3 to AUX 1 etc.) then flip all the switches in the USB page of the editor to POST.
Not the most intuitive way to handle it, but fortunately the k-mix has presets, and you can devote one just to this. You do have to renounce to using AUX busses for this though.
Not really sure what the thinking behind this setting is.

And something else I’ve noticed while messing around with the k-mix’s channels 1 and 2: they are pretty unusable with anything that has a normal line level and no on-board volume control, since you’ll always end up overdriving the inputs.

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#40

Yes. All of this is true. I return my reverb to inputs 1&2. It works fine. But then as you mention, loose a couple of multi track channels. Not ideal but the other options I looked at ONLY send prefader.