I’ve been wrestling with some issues with VCV Rack 2 in Ableton Live. I’m on a 2020 iMac running OS 10.15.7, and Ableton Live 11.0.10. I’m also using an iConnectAudio2+.
VCV 2.0.2 was running pretty well with Live. I had some crashes, but most things seemed to be working. And there has been a learning curve.
When 2.0.3b came out, this was a different story. Several times Live became dysfunctional. The interface became unresponsive where I couldn’t trigger clips in other tracks or even get the transport to work, Push 2 would not initialize or respond, etc. Crashes are crashes, this was something else. It seemed like Live was broken. So I went back to 2.0.2 and hoped the next release would fix it.
So after installing 2.0.4, I’m still seeing the same issues. I’ve started debugging it and I thought I’d post what I found.
If I create an instance of Rack 2 on a Live track, and then try to load a patch, if the patch has an instance of an audio interface module like VCV’s Audio 8, and if the module is set to Core Audio and my interface, all of these problems I described can occur. These are the settings that would work for the Standalone program, so I am loading a patch into Live that I had developed or saved from VCV Rack 2 Standalone. This also has happened when I loaded other people’s patches. The key thing is that the audio interface module is defaulting to Core Audio, not to the DAW when I load the patch. The frozen aspects of Live occur as soon as I load the patch.
If I load a patch where the Audio 8 was saved with DAW as the selection, it loads fine and Live works fine.
If I load a patch that is saved with a setting for Audio 8 of Core Audio and not DAW, I can then change Audio 8 to DAW, but Live still remains basically frozen. If I then turn off Core Audio in Live’s preferences, and then turn it back on, then everything starts working as expected.
So far this has been pretty consistent. And I’m happy I found a work around. I’m wondering if anyone else has seen this issue.