BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and we're looking at the CME UF50 keyboard. Now, a while back you probably saw me install a Waldorf Board in here and the UF 400e. Well, CME sent it back to us so we can actually take the time to do a decent review of the UF 400e.

First thing I have to say about this particular interface is that they have a pretty cool mixer. The problem is I've had it working; now it seems to not be working. I have microphone plugged in for input. Check, one, two. Check, one, two. I'm going to talk into the microphone. Check, one, two. Check. I've lost all control of it now. If I put analog in as my analog out 1 and 2, see now you can hear it but I seem to not be able to control the levels or the master control. Really strange; it's happened a few times now and I'm not sure why, so for the moment I'm going to turn this mic off and switch over to my built in one.

So now, you'll notice though that I can pretty much assign these to the digital in, digital mixer, yada, yada, you get the idea. I can set my master clock to be internal or external, anywhere from 32,000 Hz to 192 Hz. For now, I will set it at 48, and you can go to your ASIO settings and actually set the buffer latency, which is this is very useful. The keyboard with the interface seems to have a very good control over latency, so you'll see if I take it all the way down here, I'm at 105 samples, 2.2 ms of latency. That's really good. A lot of hardware doesn't have that good of latency control so that's - on this level at least. I mean you get into higher level stuff like MOTU hardware and Digidesign stuff, of course it's going to be a bit better. Let me play this back a little bit.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK A SONAR PROJECT THROUGH THE UF50's UF 400e MODULE]

What we're hearing right now is playback through the UF 400. There are two outputs on the back, one of them I plugged into my direct out box and I also have an audio in jack hooked up with this microphone, and again I can talk into it if I want. One way I can do that is by assigning a record track here. You can go to my inputs, left in, stop this for a second, make sure it's working. Check, one, two. Check, one, two. It looks like it's recording so I'll record a line very quickly.

[BILL HOLLAND RECORDING A VOCAL TRACK INTO THE SONAR PROJECT THROUGH THE UF50's UF 400e MODULE]

All right, and let's play that back and see what that latency sounds like on this particular piece of hardware.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS BACK A SONAR PROJECT THROUGH THE UF50's UF 400e MODULE]

So you can see it's recorded my audio there although the levels are pretty low, and unfortunately if I can't control it using the control panel, that's going to cause a real problem. Again, I had it working earlier. For some reason, it just flaked out on me and stopped working.

There's also a MIDI editor that you can get from the CME web site, right here, the UF Editor, allows you to control your top knobs, that's these guys up here, your volume sliders 1 through 8 and 9 through 16. The way you access those is by hitting layer. A is 1 through 8, B is 9 through 16, then drawbars when it's off. Now, you can also assign sequence remote which is your -- this guy right here, your transport, and right now everything's at default, so you'll notice also there's these settings for the wheel, external controls, and your keys as well, so you can actually go in here and assign MIDI signal to your keys. This is especially useful if you're a VJ and you want to set custom controls to control your video. Exit the program.

Now back in here, we can actually use this to control.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS AND CONTROLS A PROJECT IN SONAR]

I can also use this to control my keyboard.

[BILL HOLLAND CONTROLS A SOFTWARE SYNTHESIZER IN SONAR]

You'll notice I can transpose up and down 3 or down -3...,

[BILL HOLLAND DEMONSTRATES TRANSPOSE FUNCTIONS OF THE UF50]

...and that I can use it to control the individual parameters within my synthesizer. For now, I'm going to take of, but in the next video you'll see I will take the UF50 and actually assign these parameters and show you how the Mackie Control Universal works with mixer interfaces, but for now I'm Bill Holland and this is Gearwire.Com.