Rewire is a piece of cake compared to JackAudio.
Jack is a great environment if you have time to experiment, patch or tweak but it’s nothing straight forward.
I’ve been using Jack on windows a lot at some point, to “sandbox” soundbanks and synths in Cantabile and have a “streamlined” midi sequence DAW session (studio One) without any embedded vst instrument, by that time S1 was crashing more than often when high on load.
Eventually, I could achieve and optimize workload between apps but Latency was a huge problem (adding up from app to app, no compensation), midi clock never too tight and communication from virtual ports to other ports would be tedious to set up correctly, nothing as user friendly as rewire can be.
Ableton Link is keeping apps/device synced up in a very simple and intuitive way, on IPhone/IPad especially, and now with Reason and Bitwig.
Late to the party, but I have a somewhat working replacement that is far easier than messing around with jack audio drivers.
Just download the Reaper free plugins, specifically reastream. Load reastream vst in daw, give it a name, select local network. Open in another daw, have it receive on that name, and presto, you have audio between daws and you can route as many channels as your system can handle.
For midi, free loopmidi drivers here. Works like a charm now. I can run audio from non-rewire apps like bitwig to renoise, cubase and route midi by selecting a loopmidi device in my daw
(Aside, I like to run bitwig into other daws for lots of reasons: eg in BW I have 4 instances of kontakt on an x-y grid all being auto crossfaded between each other. With loopback midi out of cubase I can play bitwig device chains just like another instrument in my cubase project. Frequently, I’m running renoise at the same time into bitwig so I can do proper sidechaining, recording loops etc.)
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I think ReWire is a fantastic invention but It’s missing some things that would make working with two DAW’s a lot easier - like the fact that only the ReWire host controls global variables like tempo, time signature, etc. An example of this would be ReWiring Renoise as a ReWire slave into a host DAW and having tempo change pattern commands throughout your project - they will not work unless you change the tempo on your host DAW.
TL;DR ReWire is a great thing, but it needs some work to truly bridge the gap between separate DAWs.
Cubase 12 dropped ReWire support. What’s the next-best solution?
Studio One
Let’s try this again: next-best solution whilst keeping my current software and hardware (RME RayDat)
S1 doesnt even get off the starting grid for my requirements. No surround sound for starters, lackluster MIDI editing, no virtual reality support. I could go on for hours.
Who knows how long S1 will support ReWire? PreSonus.
Redux?
Already use it for some things, but I’m a major tracker nerd, that’s what I came up on. Not having full Renoise wouldn’t be great for me. Love Renoise!
Does cubase offer other ways to sync playback? Like that new method from Ableton, ‘ableton link’? Now supported in Renoise 3.4;
https://forum.renoise.com/t/renoise-3-4-0-redux-1-3-0-released/
No Ableton Link support, unfortunately, that would have been very cool.
I think the Redux presents a good way forward, but it would need some expanding to approximate the Renoise workflow inside something like Ableton 12.
First major thing for Redux, in my view, would be to allow more than one instrument so that we could assemble proper compositions inside of a pattern in a single instance of Redux and use a multi-output system like that in Kontakt.
The dream, for me, would be to simply make Renoise into a VST plugin. Maybe removing the VSTi hosting to avoid memory issues (for example, loading a lot of heavy Kontakt instances and then saving the Renoise VST into the host project file - could create problems).
Sadly my use of Renoise is almost at zero these days due to the evaporation of ReWire, forcing me to work in Ableton Live 12 exclusively. I feel violated really - but the work has to continue and I need to adapt. But it still makes me very sad when I think about that connection I’ve always had with Renoise and Trackers in general.
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I am not sure, but does your OS have something like JACK or Pipewire in Linux?
For example, could something like this be used as a generic tool?
There are tools like this, it’s a bit of a mess - but none of these really have the transport sync of ReWire, which is absolutely crucial to getting ReNoise to become one with the host DAW.
Currently the workable options seem to be using Redux (though this does not really come very close to ReNoise) or to work with an older version of Ableton Live that still supports ReWire.
By transport sync, do you mean you want to sync the play/stop buttons? If you just want to sync tempo, bars, etc., Ableton Link would be useful.
It may be tedious, but if you combine that with MIDI Clock related functions, etc., it looks like in principle you could do what you want to do.
- https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209774225-Setting-up-a-virtual-MIDI-bus
- https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010526359-How-to-route-audio-between-applications
Sorry if that is not the case.
Like ReWire, I’d be looking for absolute song position sync (beat/bar/tempo/transport) so that i could jump anywhere in the host app and have Renoise follow precisely. Also, of course, multi-channel audio.
I don’t mean to offend you, but from what you say, it seems to me that the problem is more with Ableton Live and not Renoise, which may be more cumbersome than Rewire, but there are alternatives.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
No, sorry, I misread that. I think you are fine.