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FAQ

I found a bug.

All bug reports must be reproducible, otherwise they cannot be tested and fixed in a future release of Rack.

Search Rack's issue tracker to check if someone else has posted a similar bug report. If you believe the problem has never been reported before, create a GitHub account (it's free) and open a bug report issue. You must fill out the issue template, or it will be closed.

I have a feature request.

All features added to Rack must begin with a well-written proposal. If approved, it is implemented, publicly tested with development builds, and released in a future Rack version.

Search Rack's issue tracker to check if someone else has posted a similar feature request. If you believe the feature has never been requested before, create a GitHub account (it's free) and open an feature request issue. You must fill out the issue template, or it will be closed.

Where is the “Rack user folder”?

The Rack user folder stores data readable/writable by Rack. You can open it by choosing Help > Open user folder in the Rack menu bar, or by navigating to

  • MacOS: Documents/Rack/
  • Windows: My Documents/Rack/
  • Linux: ~/.Rack/

When running Rack in development mode, it is your current working directory instead.

Will Rack be ported to iOS or Android?

It is not planned. There are many issues with such a project.

  • Technical:

    • Tablet and phone users don't normally use mice, so a touch driver would need to be written. If GLFW is still used, touch support would need to be added to the library.
    • There is no user-managed filesystem on iOS, and forcing users to mess with the filesystem is bad UX on Android, so plugin folders and patch files would need to be managed entirely by Rack itself.
    • RtAudio and RtMidi don't have iOS Core Audio/MIDI or Android HAL/OpenSL ES backends, so they would need to be added and tested.
    • Apple does not allow apps distributed through the store to download and execute code, so either all plugins would need to be included in the distributable, or it could only be distributed on jailbroken iOS devices, which is an absurd user requirement.

  • Business:

    • Such a port would be expensive to develop, so it would need to be sold commercially. Some plugins (proprietary, GPL, etc) would need special licensing agreements in order to be included in the package. Some plugins would increase the cost of the product if included in the package. Others would simply be omitted from the third-party plugin collection.
    • The friction for a developer to build and test their plugins on iOS/Android is significantly higher than the three desktop OS's, which may decrease their willingness to develop Rack plugins.
    • When serving an app on the App Store or Google Play, Apple and Google are not obligated to continue serving an app and may remove it at will or change policies on a whim that can disrupt VCV's business model. This would place a large risk upon VCV.

Why does VCV Audio consume so much CPU?

The CPU timer measures the average time spent processing each sample, not the CPU energy consumption of modules. Since audio devices need to play audio at real-time (rather than as fast as the Rack engine can run), the VCV Audio modules need to wait for the last audio buffer to finish playing before sending a new audio buffer. While waiting, the engine thread is put to sleep, so no energy is consumed by the thread. See CPU timer for more info.

Is VCV Rack available as a VST/AU/AAX plugin for DAWs?

VCV Rack is a standalone application, not a DAW plugin, since Rack can be fully considered a DAW itself. However, due to user demand, Rack will be available as a 64-bit VST2 plugin for around $99 shortly after Rack v2 is released around Dec 2019. VST3/AU/AAX/LV2 versions might be released afterwards, but this is not yet confirmed. All Rack v2 plugins will be compatible with the plugin version of Rack. The standalone version of Rack v2 will continue to be free/open-source.

VCV Bridge was a VST2/AU plugin for bridging the standalone version of Rack with a DAW. However, inter-process communication of audio buffers does not meet the reliability requirements of VCV and its users, so it is no longer distributed as of Rack v1. The audio/MIDI Bridge drivers will be removed in Rack v2.

Does VCV Rack work with touch screens?

Rack's window library GLFW does not support touch input, so Rack relies on the operating system to control the mouse cursor using the touch screen. This means that multi-touch gestures do not work. However, you can set "allowCursorLock" to false in <Rack user dir>/settings.json to improve touch cursor handling for knobs.