Add your fave Win VST plugins to the mix

FINAL UPDATE 04.09.2014 (refined the tutorial to reflect a much easier install)

There are plenty of nice free and commercial VST plugins available only for Windows. As probably most of you already know, they could be used in your OS X DAW with Wine (JackWASIO, VFX). Or with a virtual machine (VirtualBox, Fusion). Or a networked Win machine.. I've thoroughly tested every single one of these options only to hit disappointment. Initially this post was all about painstakingly setting up a VST host in wacvst.

But instead of refining and updating the wacvst post as intended, I finally came to a more decent conclusion. Actually bringing back a three years old idea of mine and improving it so I can share it with you, would be the only way to go in using the smoothest and easiest to setup method of having Win VST plugins in the mix as well.

A different instrument rack for Ableton Live

As you already know for using instruments with multiple outputs you have to create one additional audio track for each of the instrument's outputs in order to bypass its own mixer, which is not very convenient

This method only works with AU instrument plugins not with VST ones and the outcome is a very nice instrument rack containing a mixer with all your inserts for every output and no additional audio tracks. For this purpose I'll use the free Kontakt 4 Player but this method can be applied to any AU instrument with multiple outputs

Track freezing in Ableton Live whilst streaming with WormHole

WormHole is an audio streaming over LAN plugin, very useful if you want to use your daw networked with another computer for audio tasks. This post should apply to Windows XP/7 setups as well

The purpose of this post is not to talk about wormhole but to help people who already use it how to process tracks with wormhole inserts without having to create a new audio track to record the outcome

Freezing while streaming can only be done obviously in real-time and Live has no way of knowing wormhole is a streaming plugin so we'll have to trick Live into freezing the tracks in question in real-time