Getting started - stand-alone or VST inside Studio One??

[Brian Collins]

I am just starting out with RC, and want to establish my own comfortable workflow with Studio One and assorted instruments. So this posting is to ask the much more experienced members of the community about pros, cons and recommendations as to how to use RC in conjunction with my DAW.

I can see two "sensible" ways of doing this:

• Run RC inside my DAW as a VST and take it's Midi output channels as input to the instrument tracks.

• Run RC stand-alone, sending its output to channels on a loopMidi port, which are then used as inputs to the DAW.

I am guessing that the big benefit of the VST route is DAW sync for transport controls and playhead positioning. But are there other factors to consider??

[musicdevelopments]

That is a good question, I hope an experienced user will share the best workflow.

When using the plug-in in Studio One, you can use 128 channels in RapidComposer (using 8 VST3 output event buses).
When using the standalone, you can still send transport start/stop to Studio One, if you enable them under Settings / MIDI.

Thanks,
Attila

[Brian Collins]

Just to follow-up to explain which setup I chose to use and why ...

I also tried RC totally on its own with VST3 (Kontakt) playback and no DAW. I thought that might work for developing phrases. But when I tried to record anything, the latency just killed it - this mode was unplayable. Maybe a good church organist would be used to the 100ms+ delay between pressing a key and hearing a sound. But I can't do it!

Anyway, I chose the VST.

• When using a VST, everything gets saved together in the S1 song. When separate, I need to save both S1 and RC and know that the two saved states go together

• In the VST, I don't appear to have any latency

• Switching my keyboard to route to either the DAW (for non-RC stuff) and to RC got tedious. Too often I had to struggle to work out why I couldn't hear anything when I was playing

[thebutler]

But when I tried to record anything, the latency just killed it - this mode was unplayable.

Maybe you have an ASIO Driver 'control panel' specifically for your audio device, where you can adjust input latency by reducing the buffer size, sample rate, etc.. It could be a separate applet you'll need to find and launch on your system.

In any case, you should be able to access the latency (buffer size) settings directly from within RC's Audio setup tab. For example, mines currently sat at 12ms using the Windows MME API. Check that out...

[Brian Collins]

In any case, you should be able to access the latency (buffer size) settings directly from within RC's Audio setup tab. For example, mines currently sat at 12ms using the Windows MME API. Check that out...

Thanks - you are right of course. I'm not using ASIO, but switching to WASAPI gets it perfectly playable.

This is well worth having as an option. I think will generally stick to the VST option for composing as it keeps state together. But RC stand-alone is now worth considering for any phrase development and general noodling. And it's much faster to launch than my DAW.