VCV Rack with TidalCycles

Hello everyone! :slight_smile:

I am sharing here my current setup linking VCV rack and tidal cycles in hope it will save someone the time that I invested in this!

I'm not sure everything will work out of the box on different setups but if there is any question I can answer please let me know and I will try to answer with the best of my abilities :slight_smile:

I am running this setup on Windows 11.

So to make this work I am using JACK router (QjackCtl) to route audio from VCV rack to tidal as well as sends/returns.

Here is my current Jack setup:

In this setup i am using inputs 1-6 as actual system inputs (to connect a mic or a synth hardware) and using channels 7-16 to route audio from VCV to tidal (7-10 as sends).

To make this work I need to launch jack, VCV rack and, finally, supercollider and tidal.

Maybe there is a better way of doing it but currently i am using MIDI CC to send control signals from supercollider to VCV (it was just easier for me to work with the midi based modules than with the OSC modules I had in VCV).

You can find the startup.scd, BootTidal.hs and VCV rack project files at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12o_9e1b4n0Cq6RJZIF2zI_TvqdA1lMgG?usp=sharing

You will probably need to edit the startup.scd and the VCV rack project with your own system preferences and synth scripts :slight_smile:

Currently I am having a problem which is the sends/returns are only playing sound when the synth that is being fed into them is triggered through superdirt envelope (the send only plays while the triggering sound is playing). I would like for the sends/returns to be always playing but I am not sure what I am missing for it to work as intended.

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Out of interest do you have any recordings of performances with this setup?

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Hey! Thanks for asking :slight_smile:

I was having some latency issues with Jack using this setup so I have mostly moved on to a more traditional setup where I design my synths in supercollider (the Mutable Instruments UGENS were a big reason to go full supercollider for me) + a couple hardware synthesizers to fill in the blanks in my DSP code :stuck_out_tongue:

So unfortunately I don't have any recording using that setup right now :frowning: (I will try to make one in the near future I just need to focus on that and patch VCV in an interesting way :)).

In the meantime, if you're interested in listening to the music I am making with tidal, I just uploaded this track that I live-coded with tidal yesterday evening :slight_smile: -

Ndr0n - Kanji (Live-Coding Session)