How should I hook up my Mackie 32-8 or 16-8 mixer to a 2-channel audio card in my computer?

There are several correct ways to hook it up. You will want to experiment with them and find the way that best suits your needs.

You can run a direct output (which would give you only the channel it’s hooked up to into your audio card)

You can use an aux send, which would allow you to send a separate mix to the sound card.

Most likely, you’ll want to use a bus out. That way, when you want to send a signal to the card, you can just push the 1-2 bus button and whatever signals you want can go to the card.

Then, typically, you’ll want to bring the audio back from your computer into an unused audio channel pair (say 17-18, or 31-32, etc.)

You could also run it into a tape input.

You’ll most likely want to disable monitoring in your software and soundcard control panel, if the option is avialable.

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