Apogee Duet 2 and Skype

I just tweeted this:

I can’t get my @apogeedigital Duet 2 USB to work with the latest @Skype version. On none of my Macs. Anyone having an idea? It used to work back in the past and I only updated Skype and not the Duet 2 or its software/firmware. Thanks for help!

This morning – actually yesterday morning – I was setting up a podcast recording for my twumble podcast with Bastian Allgeier. I used to use an USB mic for that, but recently got a new Sure SM 7B and am selling my Rhode USB Podcaster (I’ll write about this later). I connected my Duet 2, opened Skype and picked the Duet USB in the audio preferences of Skype. No input signal …

I recorded the conversation with Bastian using another input device for Skype and locally recorded my own track with Quicktime (since I could not record anything with Audition when using Skype – but that is another story).

After our conversation, I spent a lot of time searching the Web, tried everything, I could think of, but I did not find a solution. A few hours back I have written the Apogee support, as well as I posted a question in the Skype support forums.

Now the Apogee support got back to me with the following, very simple answer:

Skype is considered a 1 input, 2 output software in terms of audio. This means that you would only get signal from input 1 on Duet. Do you have your microphone attached to input 1, or input 2 on Duet? When you have Duet selected as the audio input within Skype's audio preferences menu, and your microphone attached to input 1, do you see signal on Skype's meters?

Doooohhhh … this really is the only thing I did not try to do. I connected my Duet to all my macs, but always had the mic connected to the second input. Now, that I connected it to the first one, it works.

This did cost me a lot of time today and maybe this post saves another person a bit of time, when finding it, while searching the Web for a solution.

Many thanks to the support of Apogee though!