question on feeding Youtube sound track to VCV

Listening to Youtube podcasts/shows I regularly feel the urge to direct the sound into VCV somehow. Just to add a bit of effect to it. What’s your trick? Can you do that (relatively simply) in Windows?

I’d like to avoid converting those videos to MP3 and reloading it in VCV. I’m looking for an instantaneous/live way to do it.

Cheers, A.

P.S.: I like a lot Bidoo antN for fooling around with MP3 streams…

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antN is a great module !

Getting external audio into Rack is relatively simple in Linux and on the Mac. You’ll need an audio loopback device of some kind, not sure what’s used in Windows.

For Windows, there are some audio interfaces with built-in loopback (e.g. thr MOTU UltraLite series).

If your audio-interface doesn’t support loopback, you can use Jack-Audio on Windows or VB-Audio VoiceMeeter Banana or you simply make your own audio loop by connecting the line-out of your audio interface to the line-in.

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Thanks for this great question! I’ve never tried that before.

Send audio from the OS directly to audio interface input channels. Then bring it back into VCV Rack from audio interface output channels. To do that I had to use Wasapi in VCV. Using Wasapi I was able to choose the output channels only and get them showing up in “From Device”. Selecting ASIO in the Audio 16 module takes control of both in and out channels, To Device and From Device, which overrides the Windows setting, resulting in no sound getting from youtube to the audio interface. I’m using an Onyx 12 mixer (4 channels in / 14 channels out) and it worked perfectly. The tiny bit of latency introduced in this scenario is completely irrelevant considering what I was doing.

Output to Audio Interface

Here’s what I recorded from a couple “random” youtube clips.

Banana, as suggested, otherwise you can “catch” the streaming audio on windows within Reaper, setting up the WASAPI loopback audio device/system

My method is pretty basic, I just play YouTube on an ipad and, as it’s one of the last ones with a headphone socket, use a splitter cable to send the stereo to two mono outputs that I put into my PC audio interface. That can then be routed anywhere, including VCV.

I do the same with my 12.9" iPad Pro which has a headphone output jack which I send to my PC audio interface. I probably will never upgrade to a newer iPad that doesn’t have the headphone jack. I used to do the same with my iPhone until I upgraded last year to the iPhone 13 which has no headphone jack :thinking:

I have a lot of music apps on my iPad from which I send either MIDI or audio to the PC and my studio networks.

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my iPad Mini has a USB-C interface that when plugged into the mac mini can be set to be an audio input in Audio Midi Setup app. easy peasy, no headphone jack required :wink:

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I love that Phil Collins Album :wink:

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