[Derums]

My drummer and I are trying to jam w backing tracks hosted off his computer. We spent 3 hours trying to use the focus rite 8 channel loop back and Voicemeeter banana but we’re only able to get . poor watery sounding audio or an echo on playback.

Our intended setup :
Drummer using 3 physical inputs setup as separate tracks in reaper, bass,snare, overhead and doubling oh as his talkback mic
Drummer running a reaper session w tracks

How do I get his reaper daw output into FarPlay without echoes and in high quality?

What I’ve tried
Loopback on focus rite control but then I lose his mics and only hear system sound

A physical cable from the interfaces second headphone output run into the focus rite 4th input. This resulted in a click that was too quiet. I believe this was the best option and he simply needed to nurse the jack out so that the stereo input would be correctly aligned in the mono jack. You know, that old lather.. 😉 or I could convince the drummer to let me buy him 1/ 8th inch stereo to to XLR mono breakout cable

3. Voicemeeter banana. I really don’t understand how to use it, but upon further thought maybe I should have used potato to get 4 physical inputs
Set inputs 1-3 to the focus rite inputs, outputted the daw to Voicemeeter aux and then in FarPlay- then routed those inputs to output A1 and then enabled the Voicemeeter output A1 as the mic in FarPlay??

[David Liao]

Thank you for your message.

If the drummer would like to mix his mics (bass, snare, and overhead) and backing tracks together in Reaper and then send combined mix from Reaper to FarPlay, he should use ReaRoute.

1. Have the drummer install ReaRoute. He might have already done this when he installed Reaper. If not, have him re-run the Reaper installer and make sure to checkmark the option for installing the ReaRoute ASIO driver.
   
   Screenshot is from https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=224898. For more info, see https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=205415.
2. Have FarPlay use ReaRoute for input and output: In FarPlay’s Devices > Microphone: and Headphones: pull-down menus, have the drummer choose ReaRoute ASIO.
3. The drummer needs to configure Reaper to send audio out through ReaRoute and to receive audio from ReaRoute. I will work on screenshots for this later today.

Thank you,
David Liao

[David Liao]

Thank you for your patience.

I was getting screenshots for the method above and noticed that it was hard to get good latency on my Windows laptop. So, if the drummer hasn’t gotten the method outlined above to work yet, please ask him to try the alternative method below, which should work on more Windows PCs (like my older laptop). The steps below are a variation of the steps at https://farplay.io/audio-from-another-app/#2copies.

1. Configure Reaper to play an audio file out through ReaRoute

• Install ReaRoute (as above).
• Open Reaper. Go to Options > Preferences. In the Device page, set the Audio system to Dummy Audio.
  
  Set the Default samplerate to 48000 Hz. Click OK.
• Create a parent track (“To FarPlay” in the example below). Put a backing-track audio file into a child track of this parent (in the example below, the child track “Backing track” contains the audio file “HappyBirthday.mp3”). If I want to bring the audio from the file “Sample audio.mp3” into the FarPlay session later, I can drag the track called “For later” to make it a child track of the “To FarPlay” parent track.
  
• Click the ROUTE button for the parent track “To FarPlay.” If this button isn’t visible, click View > Routing matrix. At the bottom of the “Routing for track … To FarPlay” window, click Add new hardware output… and choose ReaRoute 1 / ReaRoute 2.
  

2. Bring audio from your microphones into a FarPlay session

• Open FarPlay.
• Optionally, go into FarPlay’s Preferences > General Options and edit the Your Name box to mention “Mics,” “Scarlett,” or something similar.
• Create/join a FarPlay session.
• Under Devices, set both the Microphone: and Headphones: to Focusrite USB ASIO.
  
  If you haven’t already, choose a small ASIO buffer size of 16 samples, 32 samples, or 64 samples in Focusrite Settings (step # 7 at https://farplay.io/windows/#manufacturerASIO).
• Click on the Channels: pull-down menu and choose Mixer.
  
• In the mixer window that appears, add tracks using the circled plus button. For each track, use the Input pull-down menu to select the desired channel(s) from your Focusrite audio interface. Adjust gains and pans as desired. (If your input mix is too quiet in FarPlay, go to FarPlay’s main window and gradually drag the Monitor slider under “You (…)” toward the right).
  

3. Use a second copy of FarPlay to bring audio from ReaRoute into the FarPlay session

• Open a second copy of FarPlay. In Windows, you can just right-click the FarPlay icon from the taskbar and then click FarPlay in the context menu that appears.
• Optionally, go into FarPlay’s Preferences > General Options and edit the Your Name box to mention “Backing track” or something similar.
• Join the FarPlay session to which the first copy of FarPlay is already connected. Under Devices, set the Microphone: to ReaRoute ASIO (x64) and the Headphones: to No Audio.
  

Invite the other musician. A nice thing about this method is that everyone in the session can separately adjust the volume of the backing track in the mix in their headphones.

Thank you,
David Liao

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by David Liao.