Cakewalk on a Virtual machine

[Jim Michmerhuizen]

My Cakewalk is installed on a Win10 virtual machine which in turn is running on  a linux host.  I want to control a softsynth on the host from Cakewalk on the Win10 guest.  Anybody got any ideas?  I've had trouble finding any info online.  It seems to me it should be fairly easy: let Cakewalk think it's controlling the synth through a regular midi cable.  It's obviously not VST protocols.  Any advice, or links, be appreciated.

[Byron Dickens]

This all sounds like too much trouble.

 

I'm sure you have your reasons for running Linux, but it seems like it would make more sense to set up your machine with dual boot & jut run CbB on the Windows partition?

[Jim Michmerhuizen]

Yeah, I know that's an option.  I'd hoped to defer that step -- actually just getting another machine to do the Win10/CbB work -- while I re-establish myself with Cakewalk.  (I started with Cw around 1992 when it was Twelve-Tone Systems, and then went quiescent just after they released SONAR3.  So the first step is getting my fluency back -- I've done nothing in synthesis or midi sequencing since roughly 2005.)

So anyway, the question remains.  Thanks for your interest.

And what if my required softsynth only ran on linux?  How would I connect my Win10/CbB sequencing to my linux/synth?  Are there any real obstacles to that?

Edited May 5, 2021 by Jim Michmerhuizen
Additional remark.

[abacab]

Some more detail about your VM setup could be useful.

I have successfully installed Sonar 8.5 Producer (32-bit) on a Win XP Home (32-bit) virtual machine. I was able to add a USB MIDI controller input to Sonar that was connected to the host, using "USB pass-thru" to the guest. My host is a Windows machine, so the USB MIDI driver was class compliant and enabled and recognized on the host. To do this with a Linux host you would need to make certain that the host had recognized the hardware first.

Then there is the audio performance question. I was just doing this to see if I could get an old copy of Sonar running, and not to actually do any music production. Not sure how far you would get with latency and all, with the audio hardware virtualized.

Edit: And I just re-read your original question about controlling a soft synth on the host from Cakewalk running on the guest. I don't think there is any VM function to pass through a virtual MIDI port from guest to host, or vice versa. But I could be wrong.

I am familiar with Linux (since Red Hat 9 & very early Fedora), and used Ubuntu & Mint as my daily driver for a couple of years, and used a dedicated PC install of Linux for that. Have installed VMs on both Windows and Linux hosts. Briefly dabbled with audio production on Linux, and quickly decided that Windows is much easier. It just works.

 

 

Edited May 5, 2021 by abacab

[Jim Michmerhuizen]

That's helpful.  So I need a USB MIDI driver on my Win10 VM, and on the linux host something to properly interpret the incoming USB stream.  Something capable of handling that as MIDI, and connecting it to Vital.

I had hoped, in fact, to run Vital as a VST directly on the VM.  But when I attempted this, it told me loudly that it needed a more recent release of libGL than it found in Win10.  And that's where things are now stuck.

Ah, you mentioned latency.  Sure, even now I'm getting little breakup noises from the VST's I'm currently using.  But like you, I'm not doing any serious audio production, and by the time I get to that stage of my project I will have a Win10 machine dedicated to the purpose.

For the time being, I'm stuck with Audio on linux and Cakewalk on Win10.  Thanks for your experience.

[scook]

Plug-ins running outside of the DAW effectively look and act like hardware synths.

Not sure if a USB driver is what you need or just some way to send MIDI and audio between the two OSes. Maybe a something like rtpMIDI or some other virtual MIDI connection can handle the MIDI side.