First of all, I can’t thank this incredible community enough for the amount of hard work you all put in to make VCV Rack not only so amazing, but so fully featured for a free product. I am so grateful to everyone involved.
Now for my question: my general workflow is to build a bunch of generative voices in VCV Rack, use the PolyRec64 module to record each one individually, and then ingest each recorded voice (in WAV format) into a separate track in my DAW for final mixing (along with adding other VST instruments). My issue is that my “performances”(?) usually last about 2 hours which means I have to effectively leave my laptop alone for 2 hours while I press record and let VCV Rack do its thing. Is there a way to tell VCV Rack that I want it to process the signals as fast as it can, rather than being limited to real time?
Interesting question - I think about this kind of thing a fair bit too. I don’t have an answer, but maybe as a follow-up question I’m wondering if there’s a way to run generative patches for a set amount of time and output to a file or stream without having to open the full visual rack program - to make the process more efficient. It’d be so very, very cool to generate new randomised sounds with Rack from the command-line.
Adding option “-h filename.vcv” to rack v2 community edition starts it in headless mode and loads the patch “filename.vcv”
I would record the audio output using something like reaper+rearoute.
To instead use a recorder inside VCV in headless mode, you would need a combination of an “on-launch” trigger and a timed trigger to control the recorder start/stop. Or you could trigger the recorder from the outside using OSC or MIDI.
But … the recorder modules I know of, expect you to enter a filename in the GUI.
I don’t know how this could work in headless mode - modules need to have that functionality added, to get the output filename from the commandline - or generate unique filenames.
Different workflow in the “Studio Edition” - here you would probably record the output of the VCV Rack VST2 in your DAW.