I’m creating a new topic for a thread that I responded to regarding recording Cantabile using virtual audio (or MIDI) cables into a DAW.
Synopsis:
I would like to try recording my Cantabile output using Reaper. Yes, I know that Cantabile has recording functionality built-in, but I want to add tracks to an existing multi-track recording. I tried the C3 recording approach first, but had difficulty trying to sync my recording to the original recording when importing into the DAW. The recording to which I am trying to add tracks, does not have a click track or any other time codes - it’s a real-time recording. In addition, even when I was able to line up the beginning of my recording with the start of the original track I found that the recording did not maintain the sync through out the song (perhaps it was my playing?). Perhaps the suggested approaches of using Cantabile recording would work better if there was a sync signal in the original recording.
As I understand it, I need to use a virtual audio cable to direct the Cantabile output to Reaper. Some superficial searching found references to “Virtual Audio Cable”, “Synchronous Audio Router” and Voicemeeter. I know that @terrybritton has graciously produced a number of videos on using Voicemeeter, but I believe his goal was to produce live webcasts, so I’m not sure if Voicemeeter is the best tool for simply recording from Cantabile.
Due to the sync issues I thought I would try and record using a DAW. I thought that rather than sending the audio out (D/A conversion) from C3 into another DAW system (A/D conversion) using physical cables, it seemed that it should be possible to use a virtual audio cable to capture the recording directly into the DAW on the same machine as C3. Yes, I understand that CPU performance may be an issue, but a number of people reported about the low overhead of Reaper, so I thought it would be worth a try on my system.
I send tracks to Audition or Cakewalk using MOTU AVB. My unit is a MOTU 8M. Not saying people should go out and buy one, but if you have one, this can be done via your routing configuration (below, the ADAT routes). It takes a little time to wrap your head around it. So much so that I cheated a little bit by routing a physical optical cable from ADAT out (labeled A) to ADAT in (labeled B).
…but… I think it can be done without the cable with the right configuration. I just got it to a working point and didn’t have any issues or sound degradation so I left it that way.
I go a similar route when recording other applications to my DAW: I have an RME Fireface as an audio interface. The RME interfaces provide a “loopback” port that allows you to route a mix of input ports and software outputs to a virtual input that can then be recorded.
The problem with Virtual Audio Cable and other such constructs is that your DAW can only use one ASIO driver at a time, both for input and output. Since you want to hear the tracks in your DAW to play along, you’ll need the DAW ASIO to be connected to your physical audio interface. In that case, you won’t be able to use any virtual audio cable mechanism, since these won’t be able to feed an input into that ASIO driver - they usually just provide Windows Direct Sound audio.
Voicemeeter, as far as my experience goes, is essentially a mixer of multiple audio inputs (e.g. Cantabile plus a microphone) and multiple outputs (e.g. to speaker and stream), but I don’t believe that it allows you to pipe audio between ASIO applications like Cantabile and your DAW. But in that case I’m not really 100% sure that there isn’t a convoluted magic way to make this happen - @terrybritton is the resident Voicemeeter guru and might conjure something up.
But since your DAW is Reaper, I’d suggest an easier route: Reaper has a mechanism called ReaRoute that allows you to pipe input from other applications into Reaper even when it is using a different ASIO driver for input and output. You need to install the ReaRoute ASIO driver and then direct Cantabile’s output to that ASIO driver. Now you have the Cantabile output available in Reaper as “Rearoute” inputs.
Here is a Youtube video that illustrates some of the use cases of Rearoute, including how to hear and record audio from a standalone synth in Reaper:
I guess with Reaper you should be fine using this method.
Provided your soundcard can route WAV audio to ASIO, a way to do it that isn’t married to Reaper is to use Windows Audio (Low Latency Mode, shared mode) in the stand-alone instrument (i.e. Cantabile), route the WAV to ASIO in the card’s mixer, then select the routed ASIO as the input in the DAW.
Now whether the latency is really any better than ReaRoute might make for a lively discussion, but it appears ReaRoute is 1024 samples, and the method above (using EMU 1820m) I was able to achieve 132 (Windows Audio) + 128 ASIO = 251 samples.
