Render audio from multi outputs kontakt or VEP back to the midi track as audio

[Swi]

I am so impressed with reaper that I thought this may be possible so I tried to make it work. I have many midi tracks connected to Kontakt instances and VEP instances that have fewer but more than a single audio output which is making rendering and freezing a little more complicated than I expected.

What I propose is that when setting up these instruments in my template I can bus the audio return back to the midi track or set up a recieve on the midi track that would only be activated when rendering. so that after the rendering the track would have a midi item and an audio item on the same track that could be edited in lanes like we do with either midi or audio now. This would both solve rendering and freezing issues and just be sensational in a general way. It would likely be a "virtual track" or a Virtual virtual track But damn it would be so badass.

[MonkeyBars]

You can get Reaper to allow this setup by enabling routing feedback in Project Settings > Advanced but it's inadvisable and results in all sorts of playback issues (for me, at least). This is very different to the typical workflow in other DAWs that have track types and therefore a specialized setup for virtual instruments.

Rather than try to shoehorn everything into a single track, I have come up with my own two-track solution which works really well for my needs. Also, I'm just about to release a script that can add up to 16 breakout track pairs (as described below) at a time, automatically adding to existing track pairs in an automated way! The new script will be available in my repo among the other utilities.

Here's my solution for good UX with virtual instruments (somewhat based on how Logic Pro handles them):

1. For each virtual instrument stereo output, create 2 new tracks.
2. Name the 2 new tracks (the breakout tracks) with the same name.
3. Create a send from the first track of the breakout pair (the MIDI send track) to the virtual instrument track with MIDI all and audio none.
4. Create a send from the virtual instrument track from channels 1/2, 3/4, or 5/6 etc. to 1/2, MIDI none, to the second breakout track (the audio receive track).
5. Show the MIDI breakout track only in the TCP and the audio breakout track only in the Mixer.
6. Add the 2 breakout tracks to a(n unused) Track Group activating both lead and follow for volume, pan, width, mute, solo, and polarity.

With this setup, I have what looks like a single breakout track whose controls can be adjusted from either TCP or mixer but all the MIDI is in the Arrange window and all the audio settings are in the mixer.

[cfillion]

I use something similar for auto-creating the pair of audio receive and MIDI send tracks for multi-output VSTi: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=165984 (was my first ReaScript ).

[MonkeyBars]

Thanks for your contribution! Very cool, sounds quite a bit simpler but also very useful.

[MonkeyBars]

FYI I just deployed this script! It's called:

MB_Create new pair of grouped tracks with MIDI & stereo audio routing to & from selected (virtual instrument) tracks.lua

More info here

[juan_r]

Hello MB, nice little utility you made - thank you!
However, it gives an error:

...uting to & from selected (virtual instrument) tracks.lua:153: attempt to call a nil value (global 'getTrackGroupsNums_IfAllUnused')

May I also suggest a suffix to tell the two created tracks apart? Something like _MID/_AUD.

[MonkeyBars]

Originally Posted by juan_r

Hello MB, nice little utility you made - thank you!
However, it gives an error:

Oops, good catch! Typo fixed and deployed – resync & grab it.

May I also suggest a suffix to tell the two created tracks apart? Something like _MID/_AUD.

Nope, I much prefer them to have the exact same name. The idea (for my workflow) is for them to seem almost like the same track

If you'd like to customize the script to do that, adding this above line 322 should do the trick:

this_user_track_name = i == 1 ? this_user_track_name .. "_MID" : this_user_track_name .. "_AUD"

Please take further discussion of my script to the relevant thread.