A Workflow For Committing Pipeline XT Plug-in Inserts In PreSonus Studio One

When I first started working with a DAW, I had come from working with a Multi - Tascam DA-88 setup, an Analogue Mixer, a few stereo outboard EQ’s, Compressors, and External Effects Processors. Needless to say, my first DAW Rig made full use of hardware inserts - until such time that I sold all of my external gear (except my Alesis MidiVerb 4 for nostalgic reasons).

Very shortly after this - I transitioned to mixing fully in the box, and that remained the case for quite some time. I still kept some of my external preamps, and also invested in some additional channel strips and preamps for tracking purposes but as for mixing, I was 100% in the box for years.

There were a lot of reasons that I chose to work this way - the most obvious being the ability to perfectly recall mixes, and productions without needing to dial in / recall hardware settings.

But one of the main reasons was quite simply that it was a bit of a pain, and some of the “Hardware Insert” plug-ins that shipped with the DAW’s I was using at the time, fell short in quite a few areas (IMHO). Long story short - Pipeline XT solved this problem for me, with it’s sample accurate Latency Compensation (that works even when driver’s aren’t reporting accurate latency figures), and its ability to store either text or pictures for recalling. Not to mention it’s ability to offer a Mix Knob, and some other useful features.

But regardless of all this, I still think it’s a good idea to commit, and “print” (render) any processing into the audio once things have been dialed in. That being said, I also think it’s still a good idea to be able to recall those settings without disrupting my signal chain should the situation arise where this needs to happen.

For this reason, I tend to work a certain way when working with hardware. The idea is quite simple.. I like to use hardware as the first inserts on my track, then print a new Audio File which then replaces my original at the proper level in the signal chain, so that I can continue to work, and still have the flexibility to revert if I need to.

In this video, I demonstrate a workflow that I've been using with Pipeline XT with respect to rendering (committing) my external hardware inserts - whilst still offering the flexibility of recalling (and preserving) my signal chain when needed.

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Cheers, Marcus