VCV Record - noise when recording

Mac mini M1, with 8GB RAM. Latest version of MacOS.

When I record, the saved file sounds fine. But the audio I listen to during recording is garbled. The “max” performance meter at top right spikes to 300+% and then settles to 150+%.

Normal? Suggestions to make it stop. Thanks.

When you say “record”, which module are you using to “record”? Are you recording just audio or also video? If you are using the VCV Recorder module to record video it’s very taxing on the CPU and can caused garbled audio because of that. Try increasing threads in the engine to 3 or 4. Also try and substantially increase the audio buffer size. For recording video on Mac I recommend using Quicktime instead and using a virtual audio cable to route audio to it. It’s normal that audio that is breaking up (monitoring) during recording is recorded as it should be, that’s how it works.

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Thank you. Can you explain how to use the ‘virtual audio cable’ from VCV → QT?

I use “Soundflower” but I’m on an old Mac. I belive the modern (open source) solution for macOS is “BlackHole”:

https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole

https://existential.audio/blackhole/

So in Rack you set the audio interface to BlackHole and in Quicktime Player you select “File → New screen recording”, click the down-arrow to the right of the red record button and select BlackHole as the audio interface.

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Can’t find the actual specs for the VCV Recorder…but…

As far as i know, the writing/rendering of the audio/video file is not a realtime process per se (same as it is when you write/encode to file/disk from a DAW).

General strategy: The quality of the output file is garanteed (…) but, if there are not enough resources available keep running all processes in realtime in parallel…the realtime processing is sacrified…and hickups/glitches will occur (can be heard in realtime). But not in the rendered file.

This way you can render to any available format/encoding at any available resolution (e.g. samplerate, bitdepth maybe even framerate). Even if your hardware can’t keep up in realtime or doesn’t even support it at all.

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