What should be my first DAW with Rack Pro?

Something that Bitwig has – in addition to all of the other things listed here – is a very easy non-realtime bounce feature. Just set up a dummy clip (or a MIDI clip) of whatever length you want and then you can bounce an audio clip of that length with a single command. The killer feature is that you can choose to bounce audio from any point in your chain. It seems like a small thing but this is the feature that made me dump Ableton in favor of Bitwig. This has obvious utility for Rack VST: just set up your patch and quickly bounce as many variations as you want.

(Regarding Reaper: it seems to be a polarizing DAW. People who like it really like it, but I tried it as my main DAW for a few years and found it counterintuitive and hard to use. YMMV of course.)

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asking what daw to use is like asking what religion to convert to. everyone will usually recommend the one they choose to justify their worldview.

excuse me sir, do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior, ableton live?

so i dont do that. i recommend using a popular daw and/or the one that your friends use.

popularity means more access to applicable info in the form of youtube videos, googleable forum posts (random guy in reddit knows what hes talking about) and conversations with other people. theres also more chance that there will be compatible equipment and plugins.

having the same daw your friends have means you can collaborate easier with them, share tips and tricks, commiserate about the daws shortcomings, borrow your friends brand new Push 2 and spill beer on it, etc.

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Renoise is a good shout, I used to use it exclusively.

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How do you set this up?

Question, why do you see the need to upgrade to v5? Are you on v4.x?

I´ve been using Studio One for some years now. It has a really nice workflow for tracking and mixing music. I´d say its main focus is arrangements and mixing. Currently I´ve started a trail version of Ableton 11. Session view is something I feel been missing in my workflow.

There’s certainly some truth to that.

But it’s important to consider how you want to use VCV in your DAW and finding out which DAW will best support that because they are not all the same. Speaking to other users about that can help.

DAWs started out as sequencers - you’d use a sequencer on a computer to sequence hardware synths and drum machines. Then synth and effect plugins came along as did ‘hard disk recording’ so you now sequenced plugins and your sequencer also now had to be able to record and deal with audio - thus the DAW was born.

The core job of most DAWs has always been sequencing and that’s what most are built around. Now however, we have Rack as a VST, and while there is certainly some good milage in using your DAW to sequence synths in Rack, or syncing Rack to your DAW and using it essentially as a standalone instrument inside it, perhaps the most killer feature of all is the reversal of the traditional paradigm where the Rack plugin now becomes the main sequencer and modulator of other plugins and hardware rather than the DAW - and the DAW becomes more like a control centre and router of signals.

The question then becomes, which DAW is best for this way of working? And the differences are really quite significant. Most DAWs are just not built for using plugins to sequence other plugins and hardware - because it’s basically the opposite of what they started out doing.

It’s for this reason that i would recommend Bitwig - not because I want to validate my choice - but because it really does let you work without limits in this manner - with Rack as your main sequencer. You can have 16 different sequencers in one Rack instance in Bitwig and use them to sequence 16 other tracks. You can theoretically have 2,048 modulation signals coming out of one instance of Rack (16 x 128 midi CCs) and use them to modulate pretty much anything else. And it’s really straight forward to do - no jumping through hoops.

Compare this to Ableton Live which is a great DAW in many ways, and brilliant when it comes to live performance, but it is REALLY not built for sequencing with plugins. All midi coming out of plugins is merged to one channel and you can’t modulate Live instruments using CCs coming from other tracks. So in Live you get just one sequencer per Rack instance and you kind of have to hack the Pitch bend and Mod wheel channels to get any modulation of Live’s instruments out of it at all.

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I hadn’t even thought of using Rack VST as a modulator for daw params, that’s amazing.

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This expresses perfectly what happened when the penny began to drop for me yesterday about what Rack + Bitwig was capable of yesterday. I’m fairly confident that Live gets in the way of even attempting this in Max4Live (you could do it in Max standalone) and even if you could it certainly would be painful and CPU heavy. I think you could do it Bidule too but Bidule is very crash prone.

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Of course set to the same nominal rate. By “close enough for jazz” I assume you mean that for a lot of people an occasional pop due to a dropped or repeated buffer is ok?

No. Without delving into the Rack2 source code to see how the audio thread works, it just means the whole job of Rack is to fill buffers for the audio drivers. If I was writing the code I’d have an object for each driver that asks for a sample at a time, fills a buffer, and pushes it to the audio driver at the proper time.

“Close enough for jazz” means that actually pushing data to audio devices is a loosely coupled process. There can even be different buffer sizes for different devices. As long as every device gets it’s buffer in a timely matter, there won’t be any pops and clicks.

The devices may have some drift, due to slightly different crystals driving the digital audio clock, or latency in the drivers. But the maximum possible drift between devices is not going to be significant - down at the level of one or two samples.

Now if you send the same audio to two devices and listen to them together, there will probably be some flanging, but the difference between the devices shouldn’t be disastrous. And that’s a dumb use of a second or subsequent audio device anyway.

I think you are being intentionally obtuse? Or maybe you are ignoring my original post?

You have a graph of audio (a “patch”) where data is coming in at different rates, and leaving at different rates. There will probably be underflows and/or overflows. It won’t be just that some stuff is “out of tune” by an imperceptible amount.

take a super simple case. you patch an input from device a to an output of device b. a and b a running very close to the same rate, but not exactly. So samples are marching in at one rate, and marching out at a different rate. What is making up the difference? Are you assuming that somewhere there is DSP doing a clean sample rate conversion (sinc interpolation) between these?

I say that what will happen is that if samples are coming in faster than they leave, that eventually the input will overflow and you will dump a buffer of samples on the ground. If they are coming is slow than the leave, then when the output needs a buffer of samples you wont have any to output, and you will have to output something wrong, either silence or repeat the last buffer.

I disagree that they are loosely coupled. Unless there is something very fancy inside VCV to make it work. Which I admit there could be.

If you look back at my original post that you are responding to, I said “My guess is that it just works by luck”. I meant that. It’s a guess. My guess is wrong if there is some sample rate conversion going on in the VCV audio devices or in VCV itself.

Probably one of us should look before arguing about it more?

I wasn’t intentionally being obtuse.

There’s no ‘slower’ and ‘faster’ generation. Rack has it’s own virtual sample clock, which is to say it processes all audio graphs a sample at a time. An Audio module is responsible for buffering samples and transmitting them to the audio device in a timely manner.

What makes this possible - and the only way Rack works at all - is that audio generation is happening faster than realtime. Until it runs out of CPU bandwidth, Rack is generating samples faster than the audio devices need them. It’s actually idle (or “idle” since I don’t know what it does internally) from the time that it delivers a full buffer to the audio device, and when it starts working on the next audio buffer.

As I stipulated earlier, the different drivers should probably work at the same sample rate. Otherwise there needs to be some upsampling/downsampling layer so that betwen audio inputs and audio outputs, Rack can work at one sample rate.

Rack already decouples the internal sample rate from the audio sample rate. So Rack itself is potentially upsampling and downsampling if the audio interface sample rate is different from the internal Rack sample rate.

I think you are wrong. I’m glad you know how audio works. I do to.

Cool. I’m only using the Artist version now, so no VST support, but they’ve changed that in S1 ver5. I currently record patches in VCV and then import and mix them in S1. But it is extremely frustrating to have to move back and forth. So the VST would be perfect for my setup. I just hope the two play nice together.

Something else to take into consideration when choosing a DAW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWNd6AkgaGs&ab_channel=AdmiralBumblebee

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Presonus page says Artists version supports 3rd-party plugins. How did you conclude Rack 2 Pro wasn´t supported?

3rd party plugins are only supported from ver 5. There was no support in V4 unless you bought an add on. But its all cool, I need to upgrade soon anyway. BTW, how do you find Live when compared to S1?

As far as I know there used to be, in Rack v1, because the engine samplerate and the audio module samplerate could be set differently, but I think that is gone now in Rack v2, because the audio module samplerate simply drives the engine. That’s how I’ve understood Andrew’s explanation anyway.

Sure, that’s easy, because you know the rates. But to nudge two interfaces to run at exactly the same rate? That’s what I’m skeptical of.

I see. So I´ve only tried Ableton Live for a short time but I was able to use Session view to record some ideas intro tracks, and then record a session into the Arrangement view without any issues. I will most probably replace my daw when I get enough savings for Live 11.

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