VCV Rack allows for generation of universe of sounds and you probably would like to record them or integrate them into your music within a digital audio workstation.
Here are couple of tips on how you can route midi to VCV Rack and audio from it to your favourite DAW. If you already know how to do this you may quit reading this text.
I'm using Ableton Live as an example.
First and easiest method is VCV Bridge, which is still available but will be removed in VCV Rack 2.0 as far as I know. VCV Bridge basically makes VCV Rack act as a plugin in your DAW.
Just insert the VCV-Bridge plugin in the midi track and set appropriate settings in your VCV Rack patch (see the screenshot)
The second method I know of is to use the external application for audio routing between different system applications + virtual midi bus.
For audio routing I'm using Rogue Amoeba Loopback which is excellent but only available for Mac. Please refer to the following article about alternative audio routing apps https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010526359-How-to-route-audio-between-applications
As a virtual midi bus I'm using IAC driver which is a native Mac OS solution. To set up the IAC driver or alternative drivers for Windows, check this article https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209774225-Setting-up-a-virtual-MIDI-bus
Once you've successfully set up your audio routing app and midi bus, you'll have to set up the "connection" to send midi/audio data between your DAW and VCV Rack. Your DAW has to be able to send midi to external source and receive audio from external source. In case of Ableton Live you will use External Instrument + appropriate audio settings.
Here are the steps to set it up:
- Set audio routing application driver as your audio input device in your DAW preferences.
- Set your audio output device to your hardware audio interface to avoid feedback loop! (see the screenshot above as an example).
- Load External Instrument on the midi track.
- in 'MIDI To' section select your IAC driver or any other virtual midi bus driver that you've set up previously
- select the MIDI channel, for example channel 1
- in Audio From section select audio input channels into which you're streaming audio from VCV Rack (those that you've set up in the step 1)
- In your VCV Rack patch, set up the midi driver to your virtual midi bus driver and audio device driver to your audio routing app driver.
- Now when you play a midi note in your DAW you should receive audio from VCV Rack. To ensure that audio is really played by your DAW and not VCV Rack, disable External Instrument device on your midi track while playing the midi notes.
Happy patching!