PV8 MBox iBook posted by DaftBusker

Hi, first post here.

I recently bought a peavey PV8 mixer to help me manage the mass of wires accumulating on or around my desk. I like to keep my 3 mics and my Roland microcube’s out plugged in to the mixer and use the pans/levels to send them to the 2 channels of the Mbox so I can record when ever I like and move between mics and electric guitar without a lot of plugging and un-plugging.

The set up is

Mics in channels 1,2,3
Amp in 4

Mixer's Main Outs into the 1 & 2 inputs of the Mbox (the ones on the bottom)
Mbox's Outputs to my monitors (the ones on the top)

I use the MBox's usb into the iBook into ProTools

So far so good and it does what I wanted but looking at the article "PC-Based Home Studio Setup (Parts I&II)" I started to wonder what else I could do with the mixer.

Can I use the mixer to do "latency free" overdubbing like the Input/Playback knob on the Mbox does? I wanted to plug the headphones into the Mixer (and not into the Mbox) and use the mixer to control the levels of playback of the existing tracks (leaving the MBox), and to control the volume of the monitors.

There are outputs on the mixer I'm not using in my above setup: tape in / tape out (rca jacks on the back), control room, and Mon Out, (Monitor out?)

Can any of these help me do what I want to do? There are also some "Control to tape" and "Tape to mix buttons", which I think could be of service here, but the manual is kind of brief and I just couldn't figure it out. I had a couple of howling feed back experiences last night.

Maybe the mixer I got isn't feature-filled enough to do what I want, reading a bit on this site, I think I may need buses to do what I want, but I thought I'd ask here.

I wish I'd found this site and forum _before_ I bought the mixer... I found this site last night looking for help.

If you've never seen or used a pv8, here's a link to a picture if that helps.