Help needed for Zoom Noob

[RawBphoto]

Greetings,
I am confused.
I have the Zoom B2.1u and I am trying to record with the supplied Cubase LE software, and not having much luck.
I'm running dual-core processor, 2g's RAM, SB X-Fi sound card, and XP pro.
The Problem: I can hear my bass through the headphones connected to the B2.1u but Cubase doesn't seem to register anything when I hit record. The line moves across the timeline and creates a box, but I don't see any level fluctuations (indicating recording is occuring) and there is no sound on playback. And at this point I am assuming there is no monitoring.

1. Should I be using in 'Device Setup' the Creative ASIO (for the SB Card), or the ZOOM series ASIO ( for the pedal)?
2. If I am plugged in with a USB cable what would be my VST Input? Is it considered a Line-in, Mic-in, or auxillary or Windows record L and R? Or how do I tell?
3. Do I need to make changes to my Sounds and Audio Devices Properties. ie Sound playback: current default SB X-Fi switched to USB Audio Codec Wave Out. And Sound Recording default switched to USB Audio CODEC Wave in.

Any sound advice (pun intended, of course) would be be hugely appreciated.

R>

[ga_edwards]

I've never used the zoom unit in question, and haven't touched Cubase in years, but I may be able to help.

AFAIK, I belive that the ASIO driver system can only access one device at a time, so you won't be able to use the zoom as the input device and the soundblaster for output.

The Zoom is effectively being used as an external sound card. So you need to choose the Zoom's ASIO driver from within Cubase. This should then route Cubases output to the zoom too, which should also give you live monitoring. So you'll need plug the zoom into your speaker or use headphones. It may be worth investing in a small mixer so you can keep the zoom and soundblaster routed to your speakers.

You shouldn't need to change the default sound card in the windows control panel, Cubase should overide this. So you should be able to leave this as the Sounblaster.

If you have choices of input as described, it sound to me like you have the Soundblaster ASIO active in Cubase. Although I don't know what the zooms choices will be.

There is a full pdf manul on zoom's website that has a walkthough of how to set it all up.

[RawBphoto]

What you're saying makes sense so I'll see what happens when I get home.
As to the other choices I mentioned they refer to assigning an 'input' line to a new track. Right now I seem to have a dozen options so I'm hoping this to will be narrowed down to an obvious choice when I set the ZooM Asio.

R

[RawBphoto]

I could of sworn I had tried this all originally but I guess this is what happens when you try to figure new tech out at 3am.

Now I'm wondering what kind of latencies I should expect or strive for. Currently getting 10.5ms with 46kb buffer. And while this allows playback and monitoring without hiss/pop/crackle I'm definitely getting a very quick ping-pong echo.