Incorporating VSTi

[depepat]

I have started to include keyboard VSTi's from Cakewalk's Music Creator prog. in my songs in Riffworks, by taking the audio output of my monitor speakers and recording it into Riffworks via my Toneport audio interface (using Gearbox in by-pass mode).

This works fine in principle - because of Toneport's zero latency direct monitoring I can play along with the backups and layers in Riffworks using my soft synths in real time, and record the audio from the VSTi as a new Riffworks layer.

The downside, however, is that when I record, because I'm recording my soundcard's (ie the Toneport's) total output, I not only record the VSTi, but I also RE-RECORD all of the Riffworks backups and existing layers, meaning that I'm doubling up on all of the sounds.

I can get round this to some extent by muting as much of the Riffworks stuff as possible when I record, but then I end up only playing along with the metronome, which isn't great for expressive keyboard playing.

Can anyone think of a way of listening to, but not recording, the Riffworks backups and layers, but only recording the VSTi ? The muting thing works ok, but isn't a very 'elegant' solution !

[depepat]

Any thoughts/comments ?

[dave]

I can't think of how to do it within the TonePort alone. You could have Cakewalk sent out to a different audio device. Loop the output of that device into your TonePort. Using either the hardware monitoring in GearBox OR the input monitoring in RiffWorks, you should be able to hear your playing on the input, but it won't record any of the stuff from RiffWorks since that is coming out of the TonePort outputs. Make sense? You might have to deal with a little bit of latency on the other device, but I'm not sure how bad it would be.

Dave

[depepat]

Thanks for the reply, Dave.

It had also occurred to me that a second audio device might be the only answer, so the audio streams are separate, but then you start getting into other issues such as unsharable ASIO drivers etc.

I guess for the time being I can live with the muting method.

[dave]

The other option is to use a VSTi host that supports ReWire. I personally don't use many VSTi, so I'm not sure what to recommend exactly. Ableton Live supports both ReWire and VSTi. To use ReWire, go to the backups and enable ReWire. (You also have to launch the ReWire Device application after launching RiffWorks)

Dave

[depepat]

I have looked at the Rewire option, using Live, but to get low latency for the VSTi's I really need to use the Toneport ASIO driver, which means I can't run Live and Riffworks at the same time, giving me nothing to play along with.

As an alternative, I guess I could import a wav mixdown from Riffworks into Live and play along with that, but other than the '2 sound card' option, I can't think of any way to do it all at once !

[Mkolak]

I end up using 2 computers, and play all of my VSTi into riffworks just like my guitar...

[depepat]

By keeping the level of the other Riffworks layers, and the backups, at the minimum necessary to hear enough to play along with, I can get an acceptable outcome most of the time, but it would just be that little bit cleaner, and easier to mixdown, if the VSTi layer didn't include any other sound at all.

A second PC would certainly do the trick, but is a bit beyond the budget at the moment - I'm too busy buying new Instant Drummers !

[dave]

depepat,

You can run RiffWorks and Ableton Live at the same time and get low latency audio. Launch RiffWorks first. Then Launch Ableton Live. Now, Ableton Live should be running as a slave to RiffWorks. Their transports (play bars) should be sync'd and Live should stream audio into RiffWorks if you turn on the ReWire backup for a Riff.

Dave

[camaro24gold]

I use the Pod ASIO driver with Ableton and RW runnng together under that in ReWire. However Ableton doesn't support VST plugins running in ReWire slave mode. The VSTi instrument could be recorded as an audio track in Ableton and then use that way in the ReWire mode.
Ableton's Operator, Simpler and Impluse will work in slave mode.

[depepat]

Dave

I have no problem at all streaming precorded sound from Live into Riffworks using Rewire; but what I would really like to be able to do is record the sound of my VSTi's being played live as a separate layer in Riffworks, and apart from having two audio devices creating two separate and independent audio streams, I can't think of any way of doing that.

Depepat