Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I’ve found Ableton’s MIDI routing with VST’s to be very good. I haven’t figured out a way to do the same kind of routing in VCV Host without loopMidi.
I know you can save routing as presets in Carla but I think a lot of the persistent linking in any case is actually handled by Bitwig, as it’s a native Jack client
i.e. Bitwig sets itself up to connect to everything in Jack when it starts up, and if I then start up Rack (with a patch that uses JackRouter ASIO as its Audio IO), Bitwig detects the launch and connects all the Rack I/O to the dedicated Bitwig channels for me.
Application launching when loading routing presets isn’t possible, at least as far as I’ve seen - but I know there are some more sopisticated tools available on Linux that haven’t made their way over to Windows yet, perhaps it’s something that could arrive in the future… Personally I have everything set up to work how I want it already, I hardly ever have to look at the routing, just kind of works in the background - and it’s stable too.
There is a small latency price to pay for the flexibility - I have set up Jack with 64 samples going in and 64 samples going out, which I think is added on to the soundcard buffer (which for me is also 64 samples) - but overall responsiveness to live controller input is perfectly acceptable for me. Also, Rack V2 is set to have multi-soundcard capability, so it might be possible to have some IO talk directly to the soundcard, bypassing Jack (e.g. audio and CV for my hardware modular to process and send back)
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The rules of this category state that “Titles of threads should be as descriptive as possible in one sentence”, so I’ve edited the title. If it doesn’t represent exactly what @markcwirt is asking, you may re-edit it.
The problem with VST hosting in Live is that it forces the VST to only accept the single MIDI input from live, and only audio routings from Live (usually only two, even in VSTs that support more than that). Try getting 4 audio ins and outs and 4 MIDI ins and outs from the Reaktor VST in Live and you’ll immediately see what I’m talking about – Live simply doesn’t allow it, even though the Reaktor VST itself does allow it (and you can do it in other DAWs).
In the standalone VCV I frequently use multiple (>= 4) audio inputs/outputs and multiple MIDI in/out channels; this is trivial to do in VCV but impossible in Live due to how it limits MIDI and audio ins & outs for VSTs. I’d rather use standalone VCV and Reaktor and send the audio into Live instead of trying to navigate Ableton’s botched VST hosting. I could also switch to another DAW where VST hosting isn’t crippled, but for now I am sticking with Live. (There’s a larger question of why, exactly, Ableton has not fixed its terrible VST handling protocols, something I would be quite curious to know the answer to!)
You can save them in linux, not sure about windows though.
Btw. I’d love to have this as AU on iOS so I could properly use Rack with my favorite sequencers. I really love the interfaces of Garageband and KORG Gadget (unfortunately Gadget is not a host).
I’d really love to see a proper port of VCV to iOS, but this probably won’t happen …
Nope, it’s cool. Walked away from the Internet for a few weeks, and the thread took on a life of it’s own.
Interesting discussions everyone!
Blockquot I still haven’t tried it. Vcv gets my creative mind working so that I can face the dusty hardware and migraine inducing daws that take up far more space than vcv and the Louisiana Purchase combined could ever hope to.
I tend to do full tracks in VCV, that I export to wav files (stereo or polyphonic). I then treat them a little bit in Audacity (normalisation, splitting, cuts) and then import them into bitwig for further processing (reverb, compression, etc) and mixing with tracks from other sources, both external (my A4, field recordings,…), vsts (dexed for the win) or internal (I love the Grid). I use the same process for sc and pd.
And I use Rack as my main daw when I go live.
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loop midi works fine
I prefer to sequence, arrange and design sounds in Rack and mix in Reaper using JACK to pipe audio in and eventually record takes. I should really send midi from VCV to Reaper as well, come to think of it, but maybe i’ll wait until 2.0 for that.
The reason i prefer to sequence and arrange in Rack is that VCV is way more flexible than MIDI sequencing and you have to really use your ears, commit and develop patience. I still add extra bits in Reaper; l don’t really use VSTs or samples in Rack.
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VCV Rack is on its own dedicated machine. MIDI is sent from the DAW machine to it via rtpMIDI. Audio is sent to and from it via AES/EBU.
@attheleash Great to know that Jack and Carla work fine on Windows for BTW and Rack! Which versions are you running? And which Windows version?
I’ve just updated to the current Jack2 release (GitHub - jackaudio/jack2-releases: JACK2 binary releases)
This now comes with JackRouter in the installer making things a bit easier to set up
I’ve found that the current JackRouter / Jack is a little bit less compatible with ASIO applications than previous versions - for instance, Voicemeeter (which I used to bring Windows sound into Jack via ASIO) no longer works with it. I’ve changed Voicemeeter for Synchronous Audio Router (http://sar.audio/) and it’s actually much better for this purpose, far lower latency. So Jack is now a wrapper for SAR, which is a wrapper for the actual soundcard!
Bitwig and VCV run as well as ever, thankfully.
I’ve not been able to run Carla versions higher than 2.2.0-RC1, they just crash on startup.
I’m running Windows 10, which is all up to date.
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I confirm that Bitwig + JACK + Rack work like a charm, except audio going mad when here and there when doing some changes either inside Bitwig routing or Rack (probably due to my ASIO4ALL setup).
Thanks for inspiring this test 
How do you sink them? Midi Clock from Bitwig to Rack looks pretty unteliable, in particular I face jitter and start/stop is not received as expected (transport control from Reaper works much better). For the moment I’m using CV gates/triggers sento from Bitwig through Jack. What’s your experience on this @attheleash?
Try and see if this is illuminating:
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Thanks for sharing @LarsBjerregaard. When compising I prefer to use Rack as slave, but I see that syncing through MIDI Clock into Rack is known to be a bad solution. For the moment generating a very short (ideally 1ms) trigger audio signal from my DAW to Rack is working pretty well.
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Yes, this should be a lot more workable when Rack V2 arrives, as Andrew has fixed the timing of incoming MIDI.
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I really, REALLY! think you should make a tutorial of this, because I can’t get it to work the way you seem to have setup! I’d really appreciate it very much!
I’m sure this is completely atypical, but in my current new setup, I’ve got Ubuntu Studio running Ardour DAW, Sonic Pi, PureData and VCV Rack. Using jack, they can coexist and I can route the midi and audio around in a way that seems to be impossible in Windows.
At the minute I’m just using Ardour as a multitrack recorder, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could use it to compose on and send midi out to Rack etc. and record the sound.