How To | Bus Routing in Playback

Learn how to route Playback buses and tracks with your Playback Premium subscription!

Trevor avatar
Written by Trevor
Updated over a week ago

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Introduction

When sending multiple audio outputs from Playback, every possible instrument track is automatically grouped with other similar instruments into a bus output. With buses, Playback does the tedious routing work for you, so that you can start using MultiOuts right away and trust that your instruments will be grouped correctly.


Overview

Playback SmartRoutingⓇ will automatically pull from over 150 different individual instruments and conveniently route them down to 16 buses:

  1. Click: The click track

  2. Guide: The guide track

  3. Drums: All drum set tracks

  4. Percussion: All percussion tracks

  5. Loops: Electronic percussion, some aux percussion parts

  6. Bass: Acoustic and Synth Bass tracks

  7. Piano: Every type of acoustic piano track

  8. Keys: Synth and aux keys tracks

  9. EG: Electric guitar parts

  10. AG: Acoustic guitar parts

  11. Strings: All orchestral and string tracks

  12. Horns: All woodwind, brass, and horn tracks

  13. Pad: The pad player (not re-routable)

  14. Vocals: All background vocal tracks

  15. FX: All FX tracks

  16. Aux: Miscellaneous instruments

  17. SMPTE: A bus dedicated to SMPTE output (Learn More)


Bus Routing

While using a MultiOut setup, you have independent routing control of each instrument bus by sending them out of any available audio output, mono or stereo.

There are two main ways to route your 16 busses to outputs available; From the “Busses” tab in the settings menu, and the from the “Busses” layer in the Playback interface.

Bus Routing from Settings

  • Head to Settings → Buses, where you can see the default bus routing for your current output device. Simply tap on any bus row to re-route that bus to a different available output.

  • Note:
    You can also rename busses by selecting and dragging to the left to reveal the “Edit” button for the bus.


Quick Bus Routing (Setlist)

  • You can also route busses from the “busses” layer in the main Playback interface. Simply head to the busses layer by selecting the “Busses” option toward the bottom right of the interface by the master fader, or cycle through the layers using the single layer setting button next to the master fader. Then select “Edit” toward the very top right of the app to head into edit mode.

  • While in edit mode, simply tap the name of the bus and you can select the output you’d like to set! (see image below)


Bus Mixing

The bus mixer view gives you the power to change the mix of your buses, affecting all relevant instrument tracks. Bus mixes are song-specific by default, which gives you the ability to adjust buses to different volumes per song. If you prefer your bus mixes to be global across every song, this can be adjusted by disabling song specific buses in the Settings.

You can also solo or mute buses, which will affect all relevant tracks. Listen to just the guitar parts for a song, or mute every keys track in a song. If a bus is muted, all tracks routed to that bus will appear muted as well.

MultiOutsⓇ can be unlocked with a Playback Pro subscription which allows you to utilize the full power of mixing and routing with Buses.

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