Uhm, no?
Don’t mean to be a hassle, or insinuate that Rack 2 is anything less than monumental. However, I paid 99 bucks for this specific feature (as others might) that was described by Andrew on multiple occasions, so I’d like to know whether it is on the backlog or dropped.
I’ll take it up with support, but it is of interest for everyone who considers buying the Pro version.
Good News! The feature does exist and will be enabled some time from now:
"Ah yes, that makes sense. It looks like that feature has been forgotten about after it was disabled in the Rack Pro 2.0 build. We can re-enable it soon after stability testing in a future release. It will likely not work with ASIO but should work with all other drivers.
Andrew Belt"
(I checked with him whether I could quote him)
Oh wow that’s excellent news indeed! a lot of people, especially ES-8/9 owners will be very happy to hear this.
Even in my setup with the Digiface it would save a lot of tracks in the DAW that are just used for routing hardware audio/cv in and out to Rack.
VCV Rack’s prime use case, imho, is as central hub in a hybrid (soft+hardware) setup.
Other softwares my be able to compete, but this specific feature allows us to use this hybrid setup as a VST in your DAW, which makes it completely unique. Really looking forward to giving this a spin, some time in the future.
Good news indeed.
Never expected this would be high on the priority list but that it’s on there is good to know. From a commercial perspective this also is a unique selling point as MerkDak mentioned.
Absolutely - particularly when used with Bitwig - I wrote something about that here:
"Ah yes, that makes sense. It looks like that feature has been forgotten about after it was disabled in the Rack Pro 2.0 build. We can re-enable it soon after stability testing in a future release. It will likely not work with ASIO but should work with all other drivers.
Andrew Belt"
But without ASIO support there will be a very high latency which makes this feature completely useless, especially when playing in live situations 
We’ll see. I get the impression that WASAPI has improved quite a bit.
Anyway, the vcv2 side of things would only be outputting CV information, we’ll see how we’ll manage. Latency is going to be an issue either way.
I don’t think that comment says: no ASIO support.
Looks more like it is a warning that it might not work with ASIO.
My early guess is that, if you have an audio interface with a multi-client ASIO driver: RME , MOTU
Then ASIO might work fine.
It’s a limitation in ASIO - VCV can’t do anything about it.
“The Steinberg ASIO audio API allows only a single device driver to be loaded and accessed at a time.” source: The RtAudio Home Page
I’m trying to accomplish the same thing. I’ve got a MOTU 896HD 8 channel interface with the ES-3 and ES-6 modules attached via ADAT. I can get CV in/out in stand alone mode of VCV. I’m using Bitwig and having a heck of a time getting the routing setup for the VST mode. When send out virtual CV, do you pass it through the Audio module of VCV, I assume? I’d love to see or read a breakdown. I feel like I’m 90% there. I think I’ve got the CV out working, but getting CV in is another story.
Getting CV in is just the reverse (with a caveat)
For CV out: VCV Audio module with DAW driver > Another audio track in Bitwig set to input from the VCVs multi-channel outs and output to hardware channels.
For CV in: Audio track set to input CV from hardware and output to the VCV instance (on a different track). In VCV, pull the CV from the “From Device” 1 & 2 (or 3 &4) outputs of the Audio module.
The caveat: I believe that currently multi-channel inputs to VSTs in Bitwig is limited to 4 channels - by default you are inputting to channels 1 & 2 but you can use the VSTs sidechain input to access channels 3 & 4.
Yep, that’s correct. Was a bit surprised when I found this out…
I’ve contacted Bitwig support to ask whether it’s on the horizon to be improved. Raised a Bitwish FR too…
I read on a forum somewhere that is was ‘on the list’ back in 2018, so I wouldn’t hold your breath haha.
Hopefully additional driver support will come in the VST soon making that need somewhat redundant.
Looks like this has been implemented in latest Rack Pro 2.0.3!
From Changelog: “Add external audio/MIDI drivers in plugin, except ASIO on Windows.”
Haven’t had a chance to try it out yet though.
oooooooo ooooo ooooooo!!!
this is going to be so much fun.
Here I’m not able to get a (WASAPI) buffer size below 512 samples @ 48KHz
Any reduction of buffer size or increase of sampling rate = buffer underrun
That’s 10.7ms (plus whatever happens at driver + hardware level)
Some of this might be dependent on sound card, of course…
So are Windows users out of luck, or are we waiting for another update?
It works on window, just not for ASIO drivers. There has been no announcement that I know of about allowing them in the future.
Yes, I understand it’s not ASIO for Windows, but I’m skeptical of whether or not the WASAPI drivers are up to the task of getting audio & CV out of my ES-3/ES-6 modules. Or how much latency that will introduce. I’ll try it, but I don’t think it’s going to go well.
EDIT: Selecting WASAPI and the ADAT output immediately crashes VCV in Bitwig. DirectSound lets me choose an in/out channel and then ignores my selection and goes back to “no device”.