What AccessCaster can control

The features that are working today. Everything here goes over the same USB connection the RODE software uses, and every value you see has been read back off the unit, so what the app shows is the desk's live state rather than the last command somebody sent it. Changes made on the unit itself show up here too.

• Mute on every channel, the same mute as the button on the unit, so you can silence a channel from a phone or another room. Muting on the unit shows here too.
• Listen (solo) on every channel, the same solo as the button on the unit: it sends just that channel to your headphones and leaves your mixes, the recording and anything you are streaming alone. A Clear every solo button sits beside it, so you never have to work out which channel left the desk sounding dead.
• Muting a RODE wireless microphone at the transmitter, from the mic's own channel: not the same as muting the channel, which would leave an open mic in the room still feeding the desk.
• Per-channel settings: mic gain, 48V phantom power, polarity and mic type on each mic, plus the line level on the other channels (such as Bluetooth, USB, Headset and Chat).
• Setting a mic's gain by ear rather than by eye: talk for half a minute and the app measures the channel and sets the gain for you, with an undo if you do not like it. There is also a level check on every channel that speaks the level as you go and then the loudest it got, with the fader taken out of the reading.
• Full on-board processing on every input channel: equaliser, compressor, noise gate, de-esser, high-pass filter, tone shaping and pan, with ready-made mic presets and your own saved presets. The SMART pads mix is the exception, and that is the unit's own limit rather than ours: it has a mute, a solo and a fader, and the unit applies no processing to it.
• Per-channel voice effects (reverb and echo) and their settings.
• Master output processing: the Master Compellor and an output delay for lining audio up with video.
• Fader assignment for every fader on your unit, with a one-press reset to the default layout.
• Output routing: each output's mix (Main Mix, Mix Minus, or a custom per-source mix), read live from the unit, plus mix presets, which save the whole set of mixes under a name so you can put them all back in one press.
• Monitor mix levels: set how loud each source is in any one output, separately from the recording.
• The virtual fader levels and the monitor speaker level, which have no physical fader to grab.
• A one-press reset of every output mix back to its normal state.
• What the unit sends this computer over USB (one mixed pair or every channel separately), monitor and Bluetooth auto-mute, and headphone type.
• Muting a whole output: the monitor speakers, or the Bluetooth send, plus the level a paired phone hears from the desk. None of these touch your mixes, your recording or your streams, only what somebody hears.
• The unit's own recorder: start, pause, resume and stop, drop a marker while you record, hear what it is doing and how long it has been going, read the list of what is already on the card or drive, and delete a recording you no longer want. What it records, a single mixed track or every channel on its own, is set here too, as is whether it saves a full-quality WAV or a smaller MP3.
• How the unit's clock is shown: 24-hour or 12-hour, daylight saving, and whether the time appears on the unit's screen. Also three lockouts that can lock the unit's physical buttons or silence every headphone or line output.
• Level meters in words: a background watch that stays quiet until it has news, telling you when a stream clips or goes silent, and an optional level spoken on a timer while you set gains. Read from the unit's USB audio streams through Windows rather than from the unit's own meters.
• SMART pads: put sounds, voice effects, mixer actions or MIDI triggers on any pad; rename, and set volume, colour, loop and restart behaviour; trim a sound and fade it in and out; clear one pad or all of them; and build your own custom voice effect with a live preview. Mixer pads add latching or momentary triggering, and Back Channel pads let you pick who is in the off-air room. You can also copy a pad's sound back to this computer, and tidy up sound files no pad plays any more.
• Backups: one list and one button. The unit keeps its own complete copy on its card or drive when there is one, this computer keeps the settings and pads either way, and a restore uses whichever is still there. Either written over what is on the desk, or with the unit reset to factory first so it matches the backup exactly.
• The unit's own backups: back the whole desk up to the recordings drive in seconds, delete the ones you no longer want, and start again from factory settings without needing the unit's touchscreen wizard. Restoring one of these the unit's own way is the fallback for a backup this computer has no copy of, and the dialog tells you when that is the case.
• A Current state summary of the whole desk in one place: what is muted or soloed, every fader level, anything unusual about the routing, and the pad bank.
• Hardware status the touchscreen would otherwise keep to itself: whether a memory card is in and how much room is left, the recorder, the firmware, and whether a network cable is in.
• Wireless connections in one place: turning the unit's wifi on, scanning for networks and joining one, making the unit discoverable so a phone can pair with it, and what wireless mics the unit can see.
• The settings the unit otherwise offers only on its touchscreen: screen brightness and whether it sets itself, how long before the screen dims, how brightly the buttons are lit, the meter style, haptic feedback, whether the record button pauses or stops, the listen mode, and the monitor output's fixed level. A backup holds them.
• Spoken announcements of what the unit is doing: every physical button press, the banks, the encoder, and fader and level moves read out as you make them, in a voice, at a volume and through an audio output of your choosing.
• Keyboard shortcuts that work anywhere in Windows, whatever program you are in, built from a catalogue of over 100 things the app can do. You start with five of your own plus the SMART pad keys, and add or remove whichever you want.
• Playing SMART pads from the keyboard: the number row plays the pads of the bank the unit is on, two more keys step through the banks, and one more says what is playing and how long is left. Sound pads, voice effects and mixer pads alike, with no need to reach the unit.
• Control from a phone or another computer on the same network, over an access link that keeps everyone else on that network out. The computer the unit is plugged into never needs the link, and you can make a new one at any time to lock out a device you have shared it with.
• Device info: connection, firmware and network status, and the MIDI control unlock that lets an external MIDI app or controller drive the desk.