If you have any issues sending and receiving audio between apps, using your computer speakers for playback or bringing in unsupported audio file types to your DAW, we might just have the solution for you, whether you are on Windows or Mac. In this article, we show how to give your computer the routing matrix you deserve and how to get your audio applications and hardware to speak to each other.

When Captain Kirk disappeared into a realm called the ‘Nexus’ at the top of the movie ‘Generations’, it had me thinking, “What actually is a Nexus?” A Nexus, is, as I discovered, “a connection or series of connections linking two or more things.” 

The word and the concept weren’t easy to understand for the younger audio engineer ‘me’ when I watched the movie back in the mid-1990s. After all, audio devices and software rarely communicated well with each other at that time, if at all. Even today, there are some pretty fundamental communications issues with at least one central piece of audio equipment: The DAW host computer. To this end, for years, I had needed a total of three hardware interfaces cabled into my system in order to simultaneously host multiple video conferences, send out my mix in real-time, and provide talkback to the booth/producer/clients. This worked but the issues I had to contend with were level differences, hum and buzz, filling all the available ports on my computer, as well as a mess of cables.

Thanks to Source-Nexus, this is no longer the case and yet, Source-Nexus is more than just a solution to eliminating cables and hardware. In this article, we are going to logically explain how it works and how I’ve used it, and guide you through the reasons why I think Source-Nexus 1.3 might well be laying down tracks in the final frontier of audio, the DAW ‘host’ computer.

How To Setup Source-Nexus

Make sure during the installation, you include the AAX, Audio Unit and VST 3 versions of the plugins, as you may well find you need them! For all installation guidelines, please check this page.

The secret to reaching all corners of my audio universe lay in the Mac-based Source-Nexus Control Panel app, installed in the Applications folder (Windows Users can easily create paths during installation of the software and manage later). Using the app was simple. I was able to quickly fashion and name multiple virtual busses, varying in width from mono to 64 channels! Now, it’s not recommended to go that wide but I did it to demonstrate the capability of this software. Source Elements recommends up to 32 channels using either the Mac CoreAudio Driver or the Windows WASAPI Driver. Obviously, scale back if stability becomes an issue inside the system. 

In my case, I’m not typically sending anything too wide so the widest path for me is 8 channels. Source-Nexus sends uncompressed raw audio from 16-bit to 32-bit, up to 192 kHz! The company recommends that for best results, to make sure sample rates are the same from source, through the driver to destination.

Once the bus paths are set, you can check out the DAW. A real-time plugin interface (AAX,VST or AU) ought to be slapped on an AUXILIARY Track and looks something like this...

Routing to and from this plugin is simple. The input to the Aux should be the buss you want to send to another destination. The Aux Output should be determined by the preferred destination. Note the active sample rate is specified at the bottom of the plugin. This is a great reminder to set the sample rate along the entire path.

SEND and RECV are the two separate drivers at the heart of Source-Nexus. Clicking on either SEND or RECV will display the available busses. You can see here that all the busses I created are available as SEND or RECV sources.  If you’d like to route the SEND audio to your track’s output, hit the THRU button. 

It’s an extremely flexible routing design. I also want to point out that some of the available busses originate from other programs or hardware, as you shall see. This leads me to the Mac’s CoreAudio and really the heart of this software’s functionality on my system.

The Heart of the Nexus?

In your Utilities folder (SHIFT+COMMAND+U takes you there from the Finder) on a Mac, you will find the Audio MIDI Setup application.

Here, we see all the IO available to my system. Everything here is a potential in or out for Source-Nexus with the exception of my HD OMNI. I’m actually hoping someday the OMNI’s IO (or that of other AVID hardware that Pro Tools is using) will be more stably routable for Source-Nexus and by that I mean, selectable while Pro Tools is running!

If we hop over to the Sound Preference pane in the Mac’s System Preferences (OPTION+F2), we can see all our Source-Nexus IO is available to the Mac via CoreAudio. This is huge because it allows native programs like Music (formerly known as iTunes) or QuickTime to jump on these busses. In fact, we can even monitor Apple’s Music Store purchases in surround, if we wish, thanks to Source-Nexus. That’s because anything available in the System Preferences as a Sound IO option can be utilized by Apple’s software. We can also configure the FaceTime app to use any of Nexus’ busses as either inputs or outputs. This has enormous potential for remote playbacks. Additionally, Zoom can deal with Source-Nexus buss paths directly, as can other apps like TeamViewer.

So What Solutions Did Source-Nexus Provide For Me?

I first started really dabbling with Source-Nexus when I was trying to find a way to playback some .dts files I had in my system. There’s only one freeware app that seems to somewhat reliably play these files back and that’s VLC. Due to the unreliability of the HD OMNI via Audio MIDI Setup for anything but straight up Pro Tools use, I turned to using a 5.1 buss from VLC into Source-Nexus. VLC easily played back the test 5.1 .dts file in the FILM order (LCRLsRsLFE), which is perfect for Pro Tools since that’s how Pro Tools orders 5.1 internally. Source-Nexus 1.3 faithfully passes multichannel audio through in the right channel order.

Below you can see VLC will actually route directly to a Source-Nexus buss. That’s VLC’s audio routing and playback window floating above Pro Tools in the background. In this way, I’ve got a clear path to get around certain audio file type support limitations in Pro Tools. Thanks to Source-Nexus, I’ve just managed to do something I hadn’t been able to do before: Create a viable .wav copy of a .dts file for personal or professional use. Not for illegal distribution of course!

That’s one major problem, solved for me, after years of less than stellar attempts. This alone was worth the purchase price since I’ve got an archive of audio files Pro Tools does not support natively.

Boldly Going to Other Software?

How about other standalone software that I want to monitor in my DAW but don’t have integral ReWire or some other scheme to port audio directly in and out of my DAW? Well, as long as the app supports CoreAudio or WASAPI, Source-Nexus is an elegant path into our workstations. 

Check out, for example, Envy 2 by The Cargo Cult. I used the path I had dedicated to Microsoft Teams, to work as stereo IO for Envy 2. Now, via the plugin, I can monitor Envy 2 inside Pro Tools or even send Envy 2 audio from my Pro Tools record path.

And still, you say, I need more! So I offer the next solution to another problem.

Sending Audio Between Workstations

Can I send audio from one DAW to and from another DAW? Why yes, you can! Beam me over and across and back again, Scotty!

To demonstrate this I am going to use Pro Tools and Logic. I have engaged the mono IO I created for Source-Connect Now (the free Source Elements’ Chrome browser-based bi-directional streaming program) as a proof-of-concept so that I can send my talkback mic to Logic from Pro Tools.

After setting up the IO in Pro Tools

• I launched Logic and ignored its warning about ReWire conflicts because I’m not using ReWire.

• In Logic’s Audio Preferences, I set the program’s IO to mirror the IO in the Source-Nexus AAX real-time plugin in Pro Tools and hit Apply. 

• I then recorded myself in Logic, making sure the track output was muted for fear of feedback. 

  • Again, please make sure your sample rate is uniform from end to end. 

  • In Logic, this is done in the File Menu/Project Settings/Audio tab (OPTION+P). In this case, I am 48 kHz across the board.

The nice thing about this simple method of sending between DAW’s is I can go up to 7.1 this way and it takes seconds to implement. It’s also possible to use an AU instantiation of the Source-Nexus plugin inside Logic to send and receive from Pro Tools, using an Aux track, in the same way I described for Pro Tools. I tested this and managed to send and receive 5.1 audio from both systems simultaneously.

Now, some people will want to lock both DAWs transport as well. To them I say, use an IAC Driver to set up MIDI transport control. There are plenty of articles online to aid in this task. Here’s one from AVID.

I am also pleased to be able to show you how Source-Nexus provides yet another solution to another “universal” problem:

How do I play my mix through my computer monitor or my TV from my DAW?

Wiring is the traditional element that binds studios together. The problem is we often find ourselves using multiple cables to get different signals to the same place at once. There are HDMI muxers, ⅛’ jacks from our computers, possibly even some cool RJ45 ethernet-based solutions; implementations that typically require an extra step and these can, of course, render less than ideal results. I’m speaking again of buzz and hum and signal level mismatches. Source-Nexus can bypass all of this. 

In my templates I have an instantiation of the Source-Nexus plugin that’s fed from both my talkback (Cue) mic and my stereo mix via routing to the Source-Nexus buss I created. If you take a look at the potential send paths that feed out from Source-Nexus, in my studio setup I am able to send to ‘External Headphones’ which is the Mac’s ⅛’ jack. I’ve got that plugged into my Drawmer MC3.1 Monitor Controller. This is how I select my various stereo and mono speakers. Okay, that’s cool but I already have my interface taking a cleaner path to the same place, via SP/DIF. 

The things that I can choose that I’ve never been able to directly choose before, at least dynamically inside the session without swapping Playback Engines, are the built-in iMac Pro Speakers, the speakers in my second monitor which is currently selected (LG Ultrafine Display Audio) and maybe most critically, H1080p 20CH. That path is the HDMI cable linking my Mac to my TV, which I am using as a third monitor, primarily for QuickTime Movie output from Pro Tools! At last I have an elegant, real time solution to engage those 3 alternate sets of heretofore hard to access monitors in my studio.. This is Next Generation stuff. 

What About AirPlay?

It turns out that I can stream to AirPlay devices as well, by selecting the device as an output in my Sound pane of the Mac’s System Preferences. Once selected, Airplay becomes an option in Nexus. Please remember to ensure the sample rates match from source to destination..

In Conclusion

When I bought the Source-Nexus 1.3 update during the summer, I was happy enough just to maintain my status quo connections from the prior Source-Nexus version I had. It’s taken me a while to decide to write this article because everything I’ve written about today was implemented and adapted into my workflow slowly over time, as I discovered a need to explore the various capabilities. Though I’ve used other software that do much of what I’m doing with Source-Nexus 1.3, the multichannel support makes this software my first choice. I keep figuring out new things to do with Source-Nexus. In doing so, my universe is ever expanding. 

I reached out to Source Elements for guidance and insight before I wrote this article. They’ve been quick to respond and extremely receptive to feedback. They pointed out the improvements 1.3 offers over 1.2 by way of, for example, matrixing 5.1 channel order by name rather than channel number. That in and of itself is a vast workflow improvement. 

Monitor Through Logic’s Spatial Audio Settings

Another thing that Source-Nexus has enabled me to do, which I have only discovered since I wrote this article, is to monitor Pro Tools audio through Apple’s Logic Spatial Audio output settings. It’s an interesting workaround for those who dare to try it.

Where Can Source Elements Go Next In Further Developing Source-Nexus?

I have got a couple of ideas. Source Elements could offer networking audio protocols as add-on software. Until then, check out this great post on Dante Virtual Soundcard and ask yourself: Will this and Source-Nexus solve issues for me?

Another alternative is Dante Via.

The only thing left in my studio that I can’t directly connect to via Source-Nexus is my phone. Anyone who’s mixed anything in the last decade will tell you there’s nothing we mix that doesn’t end up there. Perhaps we need a ‘Source-Receive’  phone app? Source Elements already has an app that can talkback and adjust monitor levels from your phone called SC Talkback and Volume Control. This free app offers remote control of the Source-Talkback and Source-VC Pro Tools AAX plugins.  It would be great if this could evolve to include a real-time ‘receive’ function from Source-Nexus.

Though Source-Nexus, is at first glance, an integral part of Source-Connect and Source-Connect Now I hope this article has proven that it can be so much more. The potential uses I’ve outlined and those beyond what I’ve described make this software, in my opinion, the answer to the universal question. That question is: “Are we alone in the universe?” No, everything is connected.