Ok so here’s what I want to do: I want to rewire Renoise and Reaper, and the only thing I want to use Reaper for is to record on its audio tracks. I’d rather do everything else in Renoise. So here’s where I’m running into a snag:
Start Renoise, insert rewire device, reaper opens, they’re synced, so far so good. Insert a track in Reaper and… no audio inputs available. I can route audio from Reaper to Renoise just fine, but this doesn’t do me any good if I can’t record audio into Reaper.
So I thought, maybe I have to do it the other way around. Maybe Renoise has to be the slave. And indeed I can record that way, but I can’t figure out how to route that audio into Renoise (for DSP chains).
Yeah, the hardware is master-only material with ReWire.
Luckily, Reaper also has ReaRoute that allows you to do virtual audio cabling between Reaper and any other host supporting it.
You have to check the ReaRoute box in the additional tools when you install Reaper because it does not install that option by default.
(In Renoise, select ReaRoute as ASIO device in the audio preferences)
When done that, you can use a line in device in Renoise to receive from rearoute pair 1/2 from track x in reaper and then send back through pair 3/4 to track y in Reaper.
Also arm track y (click the recording button) to be able to receive the input because else you won’t hear anything.
I encountered one problem when having the audio routed:the audio crackles when going through the effect devices and i suspect this has to do with send/receive buffering, but i haven’t dugged deep into that, i suspect that is a specific question you get a far more better and quicker answer upon it on the Reaper forums.
But this is the initial setup that works smoothly with no effects enabled:
If you need sequence controlling, you will also need Midi Master/Slave controlling enabled, this works fairly reasonable as well with Reaper, but looked into that long time ago…
I caught that on Youtube long time ago so some stuff may have changed meanwhile (where to find the exact locations) but i’m sure this still works:
I swear I had the audio routing working, then I had to reboot to finish midiyoke’s install, and now I can’t get the audio back from renoise into reaper. I don’t know what I’m doing differently now that I did before I rebooted… I have a reaper track with recorded audio sending to rearoute 1&2, a track in renoise successfully receiving it, and an armed track in reaper to receive 3&4, and just nothing will come into it. How does it know which rearoute bus to get audio from renoise from?
edit: I am now having another problem that is driving me nuts. Somehow installing rearoute fucked up my asio driver for my interface. I used to be able to use my interface with multiple applications, with no problem, had it set to be my default device for everything. Now it’s acting like asio4all, where you can only use one at a time. Per reaper’s wiki I reinstalled reaper and unticked rearoute, and I also reinstalled my interface’s drivers, to no avail. Honestly that was one of my absolute favorite things about this interface when I got it and now I can’t figure out how to make it work again.
Seems to me the only thing you’re doing wrong, is starting Renoise first. For what you want to do you need to start Reaper first as the rewire host, and have Renoise as a slave. This should allow you to input audio from Renoise into Reaper. For bi-directional audio between the two programs you need to use Rea-route.
I thought I might try just rewiring renoise as slave and using vst’s only for guitar effects (which isn’t that bad really, just have to rebuild some chains, and I’ll definitely miss the LFO). And it works but Renoise side I get absolutely terrible latency to the point that I can actually press and depress a key before it starts sounding off.
edit: I’m also just considering rethinking the way I normally record audio into Renoise. I don’t mind the basic method of recording samples and playing them in the pattern editor, I’m fine with that (although not as readable as just having the waveform there). What’s really annoying me is how hard it is to have a riff start just before the start of a pattern. Often a strum/pick/whatever sounds best straddling that beat, not perfectly starting on it, and the only way to achieve that is to record the note for the sample on the bottom of the previous pattern. It makes navigating and reading my track harder.
But I’m thinking maybe I can make that easier by shortening my pattern length to no more than 1 measure. Or doing something else. I don’t know, I’ll experiment with it.
I’m actually doing that now anyways because I find it better for recording live input, and live recorded (and thus truly humanized) drums sound way better with guitar. I mean, they sound better anyways, but I guess it’s more obvious when drums are purely step sequenced when you put them with a live instrument.
