Virtual Audio Cable

mosc

Here's a very good utility I have come across that is quite useful for interconnecting and patching audio between audio ports and programs in Windows. I use it on XP.

http://www.ntonyx.com/vac.htm

Virtual Audio Cable is a Windows multimedia driver allowing you to transfer audio (wave) streams from one application to another. It creates a pair of Wave In/Out devices for each cable. Any application can send audio stream to Out device, and any other application can receive this stream from In device. All transfers are made digitally, providing NO sound quality loss. VAC is a "wave-version" of the "MIDI loopback cable" like MultiMid or Hubi's Loopback drivers.

It is unfortunately not free - it is $49 US. If anyone knows of something that can do this function that is free, please let us know.

Kassen · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 9:41 am Post subject:

I've been using E-MU's "patch mix dsp" to do the same thing. It's far from free since it requirers the purchace of a soundcard but on the other hand; it doesn't seemt to have any issues with interconection Asio and DX/wave (or whatever they are called) programs so that's nice.

It's slightly confusing at first but quite convenient after that.

Mysteriously; though my soundcard supports 2x2 MIDI the patchmix program doesn't deal with MIDI routing at all.

mosc · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:21 pm Post subject:

I like MIDIOX, http://www.midiox.com/ , which is a great free MIDI routing and filtering program for windows. I could not imagine working without it.

Wild Zebra · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:42 pm Post subject:

I used VAC a couple years ago. I recently just got another Comp have to see if I have the old version around. It worked well for say using a softsynth and recording straight to cool edit or what ever and being able to tweak the synth in realtime. I remember finding good uses for it.

ian-s · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:28 pm Post subject:

graphedit is not quite the same but can be useful and it is free. I used it recently to get audio samples from a WMV movie file. DirectX only.

Kassen · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 3:15 pm Post subject:

jksuperstar · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:40 pm Post subject:

Jack was made for OS-X. Maybe for windows someday??

I guess you could also use a Rewire compatable program as well. Not really found on "free" software, but if you happen to use programs that use it, my impression is that rewire is much like VAC would be.

Also, for MIDI, MIDIYoke (associated with MIDIOX) is very good.

Kassen, I also use the PatchMix, which works great. However, I'm curious as to how well something like VAC works. PatchMix has to send data through a buffer, burst to the PCI bus, through the card and back. It works very well, but some more "virtual" may be able to stick in RAM or even cache, greatly improving not only it's own performance, but reducing the hit to others. I'm curious, because as things get more & more software related, there will be many virtual cables running in my system, so I'd like to know if there's something as good as Jack in windows.