Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but it’s traditional this time of year for many people to make a list of things they want as a present (kids mainly, but sometimes adults too. My Christmas list only has one item, booze - because sadly nobody is going to buy me modular gear!)
Now, if you could ask Santa Claus for anything VCV related, no matter how ridiculous or fantastical, what would you want? I’m encouraging the most outrageous suggestions, and maybe we’ll get some ideas, or even something practical!
Here’s my VCV Christmas list to start:
32 channel polyphony instead of 16 (is that even possible? That’s not the point!)
Other developer’s soft synth components as VCV modules. For example, I would love to have the core oscillators from the new Zebra 3 in VCV, or a few of the Pigments engines, and to be able to use those sounds but with the total flexibility of modular.
A distributed sync system to run VCV on multiple computers at once, and create huge patches. Not just a simple sync, where each machine has a different patch and plays in time, you could do that with MIDI, but something where machines communicate and share workload across devices. I’m thinking along the lines of VMware’s vMotion if anyone works with virtualisation. You could move a module from one machine to another, or for live use run a patch on two or three laptops in case one of them craps out. Probably issues there with latency, but again that’s not the point. I’m thinking of stuff that would be cool, regardless of whether it’s practical!
A polyphonic version of Prince of Perception (or any free granular delay with send/return loop and polyphony - Instant Delay is great but it’s Premium, and free modules mean I can share patches with everyone!)
I’ll follow that up and wish for a multiple midi channel mode in Host: allow the 16 channel poly CV+Gate(+Velocity) inputs to be grouped into different midi channels that get sent to the hosted VST, (or better, through an expander).
my wish is rather simple and not crazy: could all ports (MIDI, Audio) stored in VCV files have multiple entries indexed by hostname and/or operating system?
This would make moving my patches between Linux and Windows or between different machines so much easier! I could save them on any machine without losing all MIDI and audio ports every time I copy them back to another machine or OS. If done in addition to the current JSON format it could even be fully backward compatible (patch newer than VCV version or the other way round).
Make yourself a couple of selections with just the Audio module of choice configured for that platform. Use a patch bay to hold the cables for easy hook-up, or perhaps Stoermelder Strip to swap them.
I haven’t figured out blending ops in nanovg (if that’s even supported) to see if there’s a way to make labels legible when overlaying a light module. Toning on dark modules works very well.
Predefined module selction would work in part, yes , but since I use MIDI controllers heavily, I usually have 2 or 3 MIDI MAP-Modules for a total of 40 encoders plus 2 MIDI CV modules (Keyboard, and Drum-PADs on channel 10 of the keyboard) plus an MPE module for a Linnstrument in my patches. Plus the audio module, usually an Audio 16 to support my 3D surround and ceiling speakers. That would be quite the wiring effort. Plus selections don’t help with MIDI MAP mappings, since module Ids are different in each and every patch.
It would be much easier to have that functionality out of the box. Plus I think the feature makes sense for more people than me, even it their setup is not as complicated as mine. Think Desktop computer vs. laptop or studio vs. live setup for example.
I don’t know the current state of this discourse but Urs Heckmann (the U-He in u-he) has been fielding requests for VCV modules for years, and if memory serves he gave some suggestions that they were looking into this. I think one issue is that they’re very much in a block-processing-optimization mode for the main synths (so external audio rate inputs would be a significant new demand).
Maybe with Zebra 3 finally rising above the horizon they’ll look again at Rack. I think it would be a huge contribution.
Fantastic, thanks! Maybe next Christmas, Zebra 3 is still in beta
Yes! +1 for that, especially if it’s polyphonic, that would be mind-bending. I was using it in Host-FX last week and modulating parameters, made some crazy sounds. As a native VCV module, it. would be even better. Probably unlikely though, I can’t see much benefit for Valhalla to do that.
FWIW, Andrew has said that Rack 3 will be block-based (with a per-sample compatibility shim). Maybe then, we’ll get U-HE VCV rack modules when that barrier is gone.
