Has anyone here any experience with the VB Audio Matrix /Coconut software?
In short, it functions as an aggregate driver for windows audio devices / ASIO.
So far in testing, my experience with it seems quite positive and I am able to merge my RME with Elektron ASIO devices, with even lower latency after the round trip through the virtual driver for the Mk1’s than if using the Overbridge plugin to bring in audio directly. (Overbridge plugin can still be loaded into the host to interface with the device).
Plus each input device can have it’s latency offset so that the audio from all devices arrives perfectly in sync, then recording compensation in (Bitwig) can be set and forget for perfect on grid recording from a mix of sources. Seems almost too good to be true.
My question is, before I get too far down the rabbit hole of reconfiguring all my routing and setting up templates to work with this VB driver, has anyone else tried this software and found it unusable or unstable for any reason? Trying to avoid putting hours of putting about setting up stuff and stress testing that proves futile
“My question is, before I go too far down the rabbit hole of reconfiguring all my routing and setting up templates to work with this VB driver, has anyone else tried this software and found it unusable or unstable for any reason? Trying to avoid spending hours of work configuring things and doing stress tests that turn out to be pointless”
I’ll just say I’ve been using VB-Audio Matrix Coconut for over a year with Bitwig with no issues for asio audio routing, my setup is 2 motu 828 mk2 USB cards and the UltraLite-mk5 usb all channels from the 2 cards are available on the Coconut matrix.
Yes it took half a day to figure out how to configure everything but after that I never needed to reconfigure the setup again.
I have 4 elektron Digiton I/II and Digitak I/II that I use together with Cocunt and with the overbridge (with ASIO enabled) and the Vsti elektron, obviously except the digitone II which is not yet available without problems.
Are you still using Coconut? I’m getting a second interface soon to expand I/O in the studio (my current interface is perfect but no adat to expand, so I just need to get a second interface and aggregate them).
I see VB has a few different options that do similar things. I’m trying to figure what the simplest one is to achieve my goals (I’ll do all the actual routing and mixing in my DAW, so I really just need something to aggregate the ins and outs so they all show up in the DAW together).
Do you use the matrix regularly or is it just set and forget?
I ended up putting the idea on the backburner. Coconut seemed plenty adequate at doing what it did, but the added round trip latency for using external hardware FX didn’t really work for me.
For just combining input devices, the added latency is fine for most things. I think it is one buffer from Audio interfaces input>Matrix then another from Matrix >ASIO. Then the same for going from the DAW back to the audio outputs, so this adds up quite a bit when also adding an external FX loop.
In the case of using Elektron machines as additional ASIO inputs vs Overbridge inputs, it is actually significantly lower latency via Coconut. I guess it depends on what your needs are. If you need 64 samples input latency for monitoring real-time performances then maybe it is not the best. If you are triggering sequences, twirling knobs and direct monitoring any real-time performance on device/mixer or other form of direct monitoring then it should presumably work well for you.
Another approach that I have looked into is loading a secondary multitrack VST host to connect with the aux audio interface and stream the audio from one host to the other. Sonobus seems to do this well, up to 32 channel I believe, and also Blue Cat Faderhub and Connector have gotten recent updates to handle higher channel counts. In this case you do not lose the ability for direct i/o with your primary ASIO interface, and added latency is not horrible.
