It takes a long time to get audio into and out of the GPU. Totally terrible for VCV modules. Not even that good for most VSTs.
There are many reasons that GPUs would be worthless for audio acceleration in VCV Rack.
Will the headless mode in Rack for DAWs intervene when Rack is hosted by a DAW as a VST, or headless mode has nothing to do with this and we will always be not-headless in this use case?
āHeadless modeā just means a couple lines of code to disable window initialization, running, and destruction when the -h flag is passed. However in order for this to work properly, thousands of lines and dozens of classes were completely restructured to make these couple lines work.
Rack for DAWs is based on Rack v2, but it of course donāt have a -h flag because that doesnāt make sense for VST plugins. Instead, it behaves as normal VST plugins should and hides/shows the Rack window when requested by the user via their DAW.
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Hi Andrew, just wondering how we run headless mode on Mac? @Vortico
Rack v2 can be run in headless mode via the command line (terminal app on Mac)
This command assumes your present working directory contains the Rack executable file. On my Mac, the latest development build of Rack is in the folder:
/Applications/VCV Rack 2.app/Contents/MacOS/
So to run this development build of Rack headless, you would need to run the command:
/Applications/VCV\ Rack\ 2.app/Contents/MacOS/Rack -h
(The slash \ characters are there because there is a space in the folder name)
If you want to run a specific patch, pass the relative or full path to the patch file as the argument:
./Rack -h patches/test-patch.vcv
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@computerscare Thanks that worked perfectly!
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Keep in mind that modules used during the headless mode have to have been coded so that they can be run without the GUI. I noticed that for example the Audible Instruments Macro Oscillator 1 (Braids) caused a crash for me in the headless mode. (Tested on Mac Os.)
When will VCV Recorder be available for Rack 2?
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Most will probably ājust workā? Itās a rare module that goes out and talks directly to the UI.
Probably. I didnāt yet check why exactly the Macro Oscillator 1 module crashedā¦
I didnāt remember about this discussion, can a moderator move my 2 posts from here? tnx
I tried to run the headless mode on manjaro and it works perfectly!
on my desktop pc it takes ~50% less memory and ~60% less cpu!
I also tried to perform live something via midi and thereās no problem at all 
@Vortico is it possible to create an executable file (pizza.exe or pizza.sh or something else) that saves everything in it? letās say that I donāt care about the size of the file and the audio goes to the default audio deviceā¦
my goal is to run a patch on a server (with no Rack installed) and listen to that patch like a web radio, just knowing the address
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me, insomnia, 3 terrifying autogenerative drones playing in 3 rack headless processesā¦and mixing live (via midi) at 6am
the question is: why did I end up this way? 
[edit]
next levelā¦then you quit
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those percentages sound promising for my sonaremin project ā¦ iāll wait a bit until v2 has settled before making it work on arm linux again and iām looking forward to this real headless mode then 
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I didnāt try on the win10 laptop. Iām busy next days, Iāll give it a try (I hope) in one week, just to have a comparison, with the same patch
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Still very much interested in trying out Sonaremin. Are there currently any limits for the audio interface you connect? Sonaremin + Expert Sleepers es9 would be an incredible addition to any physical eurorack.
i have no idea if it works with es9 or not as i do not have the hardware - it should work more or less with usb audio compliant interfaces ā¦ but you never know
Cool. I guess the costs of a sonaremin install arenāt the big drawbackā¦
compared to an es9 most probably not - just avoid the 8gb model for now (2/4gb is fine) ā¦ for more on this maybe lets move to the sonaremin topic to not hijack this one here too much ā¦