My Rewire experience with Riffworks

Okay, I have wanted to use the Rewire capability of Riffworks for a long time have had little success pulling it off. Why because of the ASIO driver crashing. I'm not sure if it is the Host or the Slave application. For those of you who don't understand that, the host is the application that is receiving the audio stream while the slave is the application sending the stream. I have tried other apps as a slave to Riffworks such as FL Studio with some success but usually the crash at some point. Sometimes I need to reboot my PC because after the crash the ASIO driver is no longer available. I did learn that if I disconnect the USB cable from my audio interface (Line 6 KB37 in my case) and reconnect it, it will restart the driver. However, this only works if I shut down the host application (Riffworks) and restart it. Remember to save your work often so you don't lose anything you recorded. Reaper seamed stable using rewire for a while then it would crash and pop up a message for some error and have to shut down. It seemed to become more frequent the more I added MIDI tracks to the Reaper session, or tried to add effects to different tracks. I played with different buffer settings in the ASIO driver but nothing seemed to matter in the long run. Some of the issues may be some of the VSTs used to but there is know way of really knowing because the crashes just seem random to me.

I have tried doing some Rewiring using the Proppellerhead's Record program with the best success. Why? I guess because they invented Rewire. This is and awesome program and if you own Reason it will with Record flawlessly. The demo period ended so I could do no further testing on it. Reason and Record are proprietary so you can't use any old VST to plug into it. Another reason to use Reaper. VSTs work very well, and I found a lot of good free ones that are pretty awesome. I will cover that in another post sometime. My goal was to add synth sounds and keyboard parts, or drums to recordings in Riffworks so Rewire looked like a viable option. What's next?

Plan B for me to Mix down the Riffworks song to wav and bring that into Reaper to add MIDI tracks to it. Should work but I have done it yet and will keep you posted and share my results with that later.

I will also try to share my "How to" with you.

If you have any Reaper Rewire experience I would like to hear from you. Post your comments please. Till next time. Have a great day (or night).