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Live Recording Made Easy

Capture™ is the first digital audio multitrack-recording application designed to make live recording quick and easy. With the look and feel of industry-standard digital multitrack hard-disk recorders, it is instantly familiar to every musician and engineer. Capture is extremely stable and version 2 offers a number of “failsafe” features to prevent power failures and other hazards of live performance from damaging your precious recordings.

Capture sounds great, too! It uses the same high-quality 32-bit audio engine as our groundbreaking Studio One® DAW and can record at up to 96 kHz.

Designed exclusively for StudioLive™-series mixers, Capture allows instant setup and recording directly from the mixer with no configuration. You could launch Capture, click Arm All Tracks, and click Record—but with version 2, we’ve made recording even easier: Just use the Record Now button to start recording with a single click!

At the end of the show, click Stop, save the file, and you’re done. But you don’t even have to worry about saving because saving a session can be automated, with user-definable Auto-Save intervals, and Capture stores the active session automatically whenever the transport is stopped and the session is changed. It just can’t get much easier than this! (We’re never satisfied, though. If we do find an easier way, you’ll get it in a future update!)

In general, the features that make a DAW a powerful tool for audio production and mixing in the studio are the very culprits that bog down a computer’s performance and make for an unstable live recording environment. Capture simplifies this environment, providing only the tools necessary to record a great performance without placing huge demands on your CPU’s resources.

Work in stereo or in glorious multitrack!

In addition to recording all channels of any StudioLive-series mixer, Capture allows you to record a stereo track from the StudioLive’s main outputs, subgroup outputs, aux sends, solo bus, talkback mic, aux inputs, internal FX sends, or internal FX returns. This gives you the option, for example, of recording your main mix or create a separate recording mix.

Sometimes you’ll want to work with your recordings away from the StudioLive mixer. With Capture’s Stereo Playback mode, you can use Capture with any computer’s stereo soundcard. Edit your mixes on the band bus or the silver bird, or even at the beach (but don’t get sand in your laptop!).

Simple—but not dumbed down

Yet as simple as Capture is, it gives you several important features. Of course you get basic transport and cut/copy/paste edit functions. But there’s more—much more than you might expect from a “simple” recording application.

Capture makes it easy to see your meters in a dark space, easy to drop markers and export each song separately, easy to do virtual soundchecks, easy to edit sessions offline in stereo, and easy to create new sessions. In fact, Capture makes it easy to do everything you need during live recording.

When you’re recording a live show, visibility can be a problem. The stage may be well lit but your mixing station could be another story. Furthermore, you need to pay close attention to what’s happening in the room and onstage, so you can’t play nursemaid to your recording system. Because Capture is preconfigured for the StudioLive mixer, as long as your StudioLive mic trims are properly set, you don’t have to worry about clipping, so you can hit Record Now and forget about Capture during the song. And thanks to Capture’s Big Meter mode, which turns your monitor into a gigantic meter bridge, you can see your levels clearly at a glance while staying focused on mixing the show.

Most people prefer to record a live set straight through, hitting Record at the start of the set and stopping at the end. Capture allows you to drop markers between songs, on the fly during recording. Then you can use the markers to jump quickly to the start of the next song and to export individual songs as separate files.

Capture sessions can store metadata, and folder structures are organized by artist, performance, location, and song (marker). When you create a new session, Capture uses the metadata to automatically name the session and, optionally, create the appropriate subfolders. It’s just another way in which Capture provides a fast, labor-saving workflow.

You can save WAV and OpenTL files, with selectable sample rates and bit depths, then edit your tracks in the audio software of your choice. Or save a Capture file, complete with markers, and open it for editing directly in Studio One, which is also bundled with all StudioLive mixers. Capture also enables you to stereo-link channels so you can record interleaved stereo files from linked channels on the StudioLive mixer.

You also can record in Capture, mix through the StudioLive, and then print your mix back to Capture. This allows you to take full advantage of the StudioLive’s Fat Channel processing, effects, and other features during mixdown, as well as during recording. It’s fast, it’s easy, and the sound quality is first-rate at every stage.

Another useful way to use Capture is to stream audio into the StudioLive while mixing a live show. For instance, to integrate previously recorded material into a live performance, simply bring prerecorded tracks into Capture—it can import WAV and AIFF files—and send the tracks to channels on a StudioLive while recording live audio from the other mixer channels.

Soundcheck without the hassle, er, artist

Capture makes getting ready for the next show or the next artist a breeze because you can soundcheck before the artist even arrives!

Let’s say you recorded a band last night, and you’re going to mix their show again tonight. You pull up the last session the band recorded in Capture and recall the saved StudioLive scene and Fat Channel settings. This is incredibly easy with Capture’s Soundcheck mode: You just create a new session and press the Soundcheck button, and Capture will try to find your previous sessions. Simply drag-and-drop your tracks to reorder them in the arrangement and match any channel layout on the StudioLive.

Since you can run Capture simultaneously with Virtual StudioLive™, you can set up both the Capture session and the StudioLive settings in less than minute. Now you are ready to do a virtual sound check before the musicians even walk onstage. After you virtual sound check, all you have to do is trim your inputs and go.

More cool Capture tricks

Capture and the StudioLive are so versatile and so tightly integrated that you’ll find a wealth of creative uses for them. For example:

Place markers on the fly to divide the songs in a live set and then export each song separately to sell a live CD at the show.
Record the main output from your StudioLive and then stream the live show as a podcast while the band is breaking down.
Export your recordings as single audio tracks or in Open TL format and import them into your favorite DAW application to create your mix.
Use the FireWire Playback option to stream the raw recorded audio back into the StudioLive, create a live mix, and print it back into Capture.

Safety first

As thousands of users will attest, Capture is rock-solid software, and crashes are almost unheard of. But surprises are endemic to live performances, and some of them can be rude and unwelcome. So we’ve built extra safety features into Capture to help you survive these dangers with your recordings intact.

Capture offers several features that give your recording sessions an extra margin of safety.

It’s not uncommon when recording a live performance that the artist launches into a song a bit sooner than the engineer expects, so the first few seconds of the song don’t get recorded. Not with Capture! Its Prerecord feature acts as a preroll, capturing audio up to a minute before you press Record.

Don’t you hate it when someone (you would never be this clumsy, of course!) accidentally hits the computer keyboard, causing your recording software to quit or glitch? That’s why Capture’s Session Lock feature is automatically engaged when you begin recording, preventing keyboard access to Capture. The lock can only be disengaged with a direct click of the mouse.

A power failure can do all sorts of damage to a live show, but at least you won’t lose anything you’ve already recorded because as soon as Capture is relaunched, it will automatically recover the session and all files.

Even if you forgot to save your recording, Capture has you covered with an Auto-Save feature that saves at user-definable intervals.

To top it off, Capture lets you monitor disk performance and remaining record time in real time. You’ll never run out of disk space because you didn’t realize the drive was almost full.

So breathe easy! Live recording is a lot safer with Capture!

The future is now!

It took PreSonus years to develop this tightly integrated hardware and software, and nothing else is quite like it. StudioLive and Capture are the next generation of music technology, and Capture 2 raises the bar even higher. This is where the industry is going in the second decade of the century.

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