Overbridge advice. Gear far away from studio pc

Hi,

This might be a newby question, but I’ve looked around on the forum and but can’t seem to find the answer. I’m in the process of building a new studio, where my studio iMac will be about 4/5 meters away from a raised desk that holds all of the machines that i use to make music. It’s a narrow rectalungar room, so I’ve decided to use the far end of it as a mixing space. Besides my mixer and the computer, there’s not much room for other gear. Plus i like to stand and move around while pushing buttons and twisting knobs.

I have a patchbay to route the audio signals of the various machines to the mixer. However, the digitakt and digitone have limited outputs. With overbridge support coming, I’ll finaly be able to stream all of their tracks directly to the computer, where I can (re)arrange/and mix.

The thing that I’m struggling with is that my computer is about 4 to 5 meters away from the machines and USB-cables have a maximum length of about 2,5 meters. Obviously I can move the Digitakt and Digitone closer, but that really doesn’t suit my workflow.

What I’m asking is: can any of you offer some advice as to how to solve this efficiently? I’m looking at adding an iConnectivity4 with ethernet running from the pc, and using an uverhub into the usb-host port. But there might be a more streamlined solution.

Thanks!

Given your requirements, I’d be tempted to just buy a mac mini (older ones are cheap right now on ebay since newer models just came out) and use that to capture all the sound, then screenshare into the mini from your other PCs.

That way you can use your iMac/Macbook/whatever anywhere you want and have a ton of flexibility.

How about using a powered usb hub for extending the usb cable “range”? There might even exist powered usb extenders of some sort, who knows… google?

Says who? I have a lot of 6 meters long usb cables in my studio and no problems.

The maximum recommended cable length for USB 2.0 is about 5 metres, for USB 3.0/3.1 about 3 metres.

However, you can simply use a powered USB hub to “regenerate” the signal and you can even do this more than once in a single chain.

EDIT: You can also buy longer “active” USB 2.0 and 3.0 extension cables that effectively have a hub built-in.

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That’s good advice. Thank you very much