Hi,
This is extremely exciting! VCV Rack running on Zynthian, so I had to give this a try!
VCV Has the official ports of Mutable Instruments’ devices which bring great potential to generative “west coast style” ambient audio synthesis.
I understand this is still WIP/in development and not even merged in a branch, so please don’t follow my footsteps yet…
I’m testing this on a RP4/ Kitv4.
I’m just documenting the process here for those who’d like to try (at their own peril).
- I downloaded the install_vcvrack.sh script and ran it. It installed a bunch of packages and 1 customised preset to test.
- I downloaded the patch associated with the ui PR and applied it in a new private branch on the zynthian-ui git repository.
- Rebooted the zynthian and crossed fingers.
From there I could create a New Special Layer>Virtual VCV Rack and open the preset generative-01.
This gave me this audio output:
I was also able to see the patch by connecting to the Zynthian:
This has huge potential if this could be fully integrated into Zynthian (midi integration etc).
My remarks:
- From the audio recording you can hear cracks and strange audible artifacts which seem to be related to the CPU load. I tried to ameliorate this by setting the sample rate lower and reducing the Threads to from the external UI, which did not help much. In all cases the CPU load remained fairly high, maxing out all 4 CPU’s. From the logs I could see that there were frequent “Jack Audio XRUN!” messages.
- Using the remote interface to edit the patches is a bit painful due to the high CPU load.
- The standard controllers on the Zynthian don’t do anything yet (volume/modulation/pan/sustain), but this could be extended to for example to tame the cpu load by setting the audio quality/cpu usage, in this way possibly even allowing for co-existence with other layers).
Again, this is extremely impressive so far and proves the possibility to integrate VCVRack in Zynthian opening up a whole extra world of sounds! Just the Plaits module alone with an LFO and an Analog Filter and a few extra modules would already make for a very capable hybrid digital-analog synthesizer comparable to Arturia’s Microfreak partly based on Plaits algorithms, but VCV is far more extensible off course, or even combining the two in very interesting ways!
So please, do try to integrate this, but try to find a way to lower the CPU load a bit to avoid the XRUN’s, or if there is any way to tweak the performance further, please do share!
Thank you for developing this integration!