Boutique USB driver: observations

[cloudburst]

I thought it would be useful to share my experiences so far with the Boutique driver. This is based on the driver being installed on Mac OS X (10.11.1), the purpose being to interface my 3 Boutique modules with Logic Pro X (10.2.0). Since the USB driver supports MIDI and Audio, I'll split my notes into 2 sections.

MIDI:
- When you set up multiple External MIDI tracks, regardless of how you name the ports in the Audio/MIDI Utility, as far as Logic is concerned, they all map back to a device named 'Boutique'.
- This means that when you swap between MIDI 'Ports' on one External MIDI track, this will be mirrored in the other track.
- The only way I've found to make the tracks independent and point to the different Boutique synths is to set the 'Port' on each track to 'All' and allocate each synth a different MIDI channel.
- However, this means that when you change a patch on the panel of one of the Boutiques, the Program Change event will be sent to the others.
- The only way I've found to get around this is to initiate the Program Changes from within each track inspector in Logic.

Audio:
- Again, because of the way the driver works, multiple Audio devices called 'Boutique' are created.
- Since Logic can only deal with one Audio Input, I got around this by creating, in the OS X Audio/MIDI utility, an Aggregate Device comprising the multiple 'Boutique' audio devices.
- Even when just using one Boutique module, however, I have found the audio quality over the USB interface to be pretty terrible. I get much better sound volume and quality using the stereo output jack from the Boutique synth via Left and Right mono jacks into my Presonus USB audio interface.
- In order to avoid having to have lots of audio jacks and interfaces, I tried chaining the audio output from the Output jack of one module into the Input jack of the next and then having the last device send the audio to my audio interface. This worked fine, however...
- ...when chaining the audio jacks between multiple Boutique synths, the output of the earlier devices in the chain is much greater and some careful tweaking needs to be done on the rear volume controls of the synths and the input gain controls of the audio interface to achieve uniform, clean signals.

So to Summarise:
My advice would be to avoid using the USB connection for Audio.
The Boutique USB driver (can only speak for the OSX 10.11 version) does not provide good support for multiple Boutique devices. Most issues can be worked around, with varying degrees of elegance.

Hope this is helpful. Please step in with advice, if there's something I'm doing wrong :-)

CB