A client’s mastering route from his SSL 12 out to his SSL Fusion stopped playing in Pro Tools, and the Windows changes he made while troubleshooting it with an AI chatbot left his laptop silent outside Pro Tools; the route needed a routing change in Pro Tools, and a Windows repair install brought the laptop’s sound back.
He mixes in Pro Tools on a Windows 11 laptop, with an SSL 12 as his interface. In an earlier session I’d built him a Pro Tools template that sends his mix out through his SSL Fusion and records it back in, and the trouble started when he couldn’t get that in and out route to play. Before contacting me in June he’d been explaining the problem to Gemini and following its suggestions. By the time I connected, the only sound he could get from the laptop was through Pro Tools. YouTube and Spotify wouldn’t play through the laptop’s own speakers or headphones, and that mattered to him because he doesn’t want the SSL connected all the time when he’s working away from his studio desk.
What he’d changed in Windows
Part of the challenge was that neither of us knew exactly which troubleshooting steps he’d taken, so I was looking at two problems at once without a clear record of how the second one had started. He’d sent me the summaries Gemini had written up for him, and from those his changes included:
- Uninstalling hidden and duplicate SSL audio devices and ASIO entries in Device Manager
- Disabling the Intel Smart Sound Technology OED driver under System Devices
- Uninstalling the SoundID Reference plugin, which he’d installed recently and wondered might have upset things
He had also reset the SSL 360 software while he was having problems with the audio, and that lost the settings we’d made for his mastering setup. I don’t know the exact chain of events that led up to it.
Back in Pro Tools
When I looked at his Pro Tools system I could show him that none of those steps had been necessary for the original problem. The routing in his Pro Tools session was wrong, and changing it there got his mix going out to the Fusion and back again.
Pro Tools was still playing through the SSL 12 on its ASIO driver, so the interface and Pro Tools were working fine, and the mastering route only needed changing inside Pro Tools.
The laptop’s own sound
The Windows side was harder, and I couldn’t find what had stopped the internal sound card playing in that first session. A few days later he wrote to say a large Windows update had gone through but hadn’t brought the Windows audio back, though Pro Tools was working on his buses, so he was getting on with his music. He asked for another session to work through a further plan from Gemini, which included deleting the SSL’s entries in the Windows registry. I thought it was a reasonable start, but from my own research I didn’t think the problem was limited to the SSL drivers, and I expected the registry cleaning would need to go further than that. We picked it up again in a session the following week and ended up doing a Windows repair install rather than a full reinstall. It was all done within that one-hour session and wasn’t too painful in the end, and it solved the problem, so we can give credit to Microsoft for that one. I helped him reinstall his drivers and get his system back up and running, and he was happy to have YouTube and Spotify playing through the laptop again.
Working from a description
I can see why the AI found this so hard. All it had to go on was the client describing the problem, and from a technical point of view that description didn’t give it much to work with. To be fair, if I’d had to solve it from his messages alone I wouldn’t have done very well either.
That’s why I don’t do text-based problem solving. I always speak to the client on the phone and remote in so I can see the problem, ideally with control of the mouse so I can investigate myself. If that’s not possible I’m happy to talk someone through where to click, though it takes longer. Music technology setups are complex systems with a lot of user control, and the hardest problems tend to sit where two manuals intersect. Someone sitting in on the actual system can look at those variables, and can also read back through the chat to see whether the advice was on the right path.
Before following a chatbot into Device Manager or the registry, have someone look at the routing in your DAW, because that’s where the original problem was in this case.
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