Dual Audio Playback Routing

A REAL CHALLENGE

Have anyone on this forum ever managed to figure out how to perform this little trick?

Play some audio (i.e. wave-files) from Renoise or whatever software. Then, while this audio still plays and you can hear it in the background, start playing a VSTi and record the audio it generates in your favorite recording software.

Now, the recorded file contains both the background audio AND the VSTi-audio, right?

So what if you just wanted the recorded wave-file to contain only the VSTi generated audio…? (Observe that we are talking audio here.)

What would be your suggestion to this problem?

Well, the most logical suggestion would be to make Renoise (or the whatever other software playing the audio) stop playing and just play your VSTI.
I presume you have the VSTI open as a stand-alone process.

What i think is that you forgot to mention you probably use the background audio for your timing so you can play along the sequence, but you don’t want that sequence included in your recording.

The descriptiopn of your situation insinuates like you use software that has been limited in use, forcing you to use tricks to get the output inside a wave-file without needing to register for the software.

Because if you would register the software, it would be a piece of cake to take into Renoise, time your recording and then just play the VSTI track only.
(or render the VSTI track if you registered Renoise).

You don’t need to register Renoise to have your tracks rendered as long as your system can handle the cpu resources.
So i wildly guess that the VSTI component is unregistered / Demo version…
Am i close?

whatever audio sources you are mixing there, if their frequencies are overlaid, you’ll never get them seperated properly again without sonically “damaging” either of the two mixed elements.
if you could do this, you could also grab the vocals from a non-acapella song without hearing anything in the rendered result but the vocals.
afaik, something like this is not possible without a significant loss of quality.

Keith, i think you misunderstood him. he dont want to separate some premixed wave file, he wants to record an audio to separate file while another audio is playing at the same time.

Actually i am also wondering why you need to do that? Why you cant sequence that vst in renoise and render it?

EDIT! I had a similar problem once when i had audigy soundcard. I wanted to start metronome in renoise and record some vocals and it recorded metronome also along with my vocals. And then i found an option “what u hear” in recording tab, i changed it to microphone and then it was OK. But that dont help you much cause the sources of your audio are actually the same (from soundcard perspective). So the only solution would be to “do it” from software that records your vsti, so it renders only that sequence, IMO

why dont you use some vst audio recorder as track insert?
like freeware voxengo recorder: http://www.voxengo.com/downloads/

^^ That’s me

It seems that I still suffer from toolazytologinitis

:blink:

So why not tick the automatic log in tab :P

Yes, the timing is crucial here. The background audio serves as a metronome in that sense, but moreover it also contains the harmonies etc that the VSTi realtime/live playing is supposed to integrate with.

All of my VSTi:s are registered. But the kind of limitations in other audio software that you mention is yet-to-be-discovered by me – I haven’t so far encountered any such program that would stop e.g. Soundforge from sampling at least the ”What U Hear”-audio data.

I know that the Renoise coders have built in a ”scan” for Virtual Audio Cables and similar software (Renoise won’t load unless such VACs are inactive). But I don’t see that point at all, since you always can generate a WAV-file in realtime by the procedure I just mentioned above.

The reason why I want this particular solution is because I use an early version of ACID (1.0 rules) as my recording backend. In that software it is very convenient to just hit the ”Record” button in ACID and record the audio from one of multiple possible sources into a new track. If the result is no good, I just delete it and take a new shot. I enjoy playing live, because that’s the kind of music and arrangements that I most frequently compose.

Granted, this kind of workflow has an obvious negative side to it: one cannot ”polish” individual notes within a recorded sequence (as you can in Renoise or in Cubase). But still, that is the way I prefer to work. More demanding programming, i.e. stuff that I can’t play live, I usually ”step-edit” in Reason or Finale.

Voxengo Recorder does the trick in a way. It filters out only the audio that is generated from the specified VSTi playback – so it doesn’t matter that other sounds are played simultaneously in the background – and renders it to a new WAV-file.

However, that procedure is still too time-consuming, I think. What I want is to route the VSTi audio directly into ACID’s recorder, while simultaneously playing the already existing tracks in ACID in the background.

While I can see that two computers certainly will do the trick, I cannot see how two soundcards will suffice for this particular problem. Does anyone here have a suggestion for a soundcard that can actually co-exist with my SB Audigy2 ZS card, in the same machine, and route the audio signals as demanded without some sort of advanced SPDIF loopback solution?

Surely any multichannel ASIO card would allow it. You would set Acid to record desired pair (assuming Acid even has ASIO support) and route the VSTi you want to record to those output, and the rest of the audio to a different pair.

Not sure, but it sounds it would be a piece of piss with my RME, not sure how differently other manufacturers do their routing options (TotalMix is a GodSend). Only problem is that the audio of external audio editors sounds like complete shit is Renoise is open for some reason. Haven’t tried recording into it, so don’t know if it effects recording or only playback.