falktx has recently updated the DISTRHO git repo with many new and exciting plugins such as the pro-quality yet sadly long unmaintained and unsupported under Linux Highlife sampler plugin which in my opinion should bring the final significant missing piece to the long sought after, near mythical dream of having a powerful, easy to use and fully open source Linux-based DAW by combining this with the rapidly maturing OpenOctave, qtractor or Ardour 3 and the other great plugins already within DISTRHO!

However, Highlife isn't ready to be used just yet. I had to rename/move my /usr/bin/zenity to get its original JUCE file window for loading samples to appear (window focus is now fixed in Linux JUCE you'll be glad to hear) as the new GNOME 3 zenity doesn't seem to be compat. with GNOME 2 zenity as is used by Debian Squeeze and AV Linux. The real showstopper though is the fact that the loading of qtractor (compiled with the Steinberg VST headers) and OOM sessions that use the current DISTRHO Highlife VST fail - they just don't produce any sound after loading a session.
Last edited by danboid on Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:52 pm; edited 1 time in total

hey danboid, thanks for the comment.

the zenity bug is present in the whole DISTRHO plugin/ports suite, not just highlife - it's a bug in juce itself. I'll try to fix it before compiling binaries.

As for the session restore fail in Qtractor, please try to use the LV2 version (Qtractor VST support is not great). If you want to make sure the VST works or not, I suggest trying it in 'renoise' instead.
I'll look into this myself too, thanks for the report.

but please don't post third-party donate links here. DISTRHO is hard work and is a completely separate project of OpenOctave (I'm not being paid for working on DISTRHO!)

the webpage is under construction now, but I already registered a place for real donations to the DISTRHO project:
http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=539284


see ya soon

Hi F!

Seeing as 'make lv2' fails for me, I compiled and created ttls for the HL LV2 and I've just given that a quick go under qtractor but I've had less success than with the VST build unfortunately.

I can get its GUI up, load a wav sample into it and also preview the loaded sample using the virtual keyboard built into HL but I cannot get qtractor to send any notes or get any sound out of HL, even when I set the qtractor MIDI channel to omni. Also, I'm seeing this error a lot under the qtractor message window:

error: get_wrap_module: Unable to wrap UI type <http://nedko.arnaudov.name/lv2/external_ui/> as type <http://lv2plug.in/ns/extensions/ui#Qt4UI>

I know this is HL as its the only LV2 I have installed now. I'll try it with A3 later see if it likes that any better.

Sorry about posting a link to the OOM fundraiser- I've got rid of that from the OP now.

My money for donating to free software projects has been spent for his month but I certainly will be donating towards DISTRHO as well soon.

Thanks F!

I just realized this too. LV2 changed it's state save/load API so apps need to be changed as well. Latest qtractor-svn fixes this.


Qtractor doesn't implement the new LV2 atom ports I'm currently testing on the plugins. The final version will use the "old" Event-Midi API, so Qtractor will work on them later.


Ignore this, generic SUIL message telling you external-UI is not embeddable.


Ardour3 is your best bet right now. All this LV2 stuff is very recent, I haven't even updated OpenOctave to it yet.

I forgot to mention that I was trying the LV2 under a pretty stock AV Linux 5.0.3 which I'd not updated to the latest (1.0.0!) LV2 and straight after my previous post it dawned on me that it prob wouldn't work without running the latest LV2 libs.

I should hope that 1.0 means that LV2 now has sufficient extensions to deal with presets for Noisemaker etc now? Is there anything not finished or missing within LV2 that you were hoping would make it into v1.0 that hasn't?

Shame to hear your latest plugins won't work under OOM or qtractor yet so it'd be good of you if you could give us a heads up in this forum when you update the OOM plugin code so that myself and other early adopters can start testing please!

The latest serd, sord, lilv and suil libs will be needed to get all the features to work, yes.


Everything should work just fine, with 1 exception - time-pos information. Only BPM is supported now. This feature will be available at a later distrho pack version.


The plugins *will* work (I disabled atom ports in latest git, using good old event-midi now). If you get latest lv2 libs and qtractor svn, it should work fine (Qtractor doesn't support LV2 presets yet though).
I'll work on OpenOctave LV2 support later this week.

I've just tried HL LV2 compiled against the latest LV2 libs under qtractor svn also freshly compiled on top of the new LV2 libs and HL LV2 works as well/poorly as the VST build with this setup as now everything seems to be working except for the loading of sessions that use this plugin.

ok, then I'll have to give this an extra care.
tomorrow I should start working on OpenOctave LV2 support, so I'll make sure both LV2 and VST versions work there.

I noticed a few updates to DISTRHO (if not specifically for HL but general LV2 and JUCE stuff got updated) as well as OOM getting (partly?) updated with the new LV2 libs this moning so I've just compiled everything against the latest LV2, serd, sord, sratom (the new dep in town it seems), lilv and suil releases under AV Linux 5.0.3 and gave HL LV2 a quick go under OOM but its the same story as for HL LV2 or VST under qtractor in that I can load and use the plugin but loading sessions that contain HL LV either crash the host or the session will load but there is no sampledata in the HL editor hence no sound gets output.

Just be patient, I haven't completed the work in OpenOctave yet (and there's still a long way to go).

btw, in OO you don't need any lv2 libs, everything is pre-included.

Yeah but I need the LV2 libs installed to compile DISTRHO don't I?

What about presets under the LV2 version of NM? You said that wasn't supported previously but maybe its possible now?

Not at all. DISTRHO pre-includes lv2 headers, so does OpenOctave.
both don't need any lv2 libs ever.


It's possible now, yes. I know jalv can load presets, and maybe ardour3 too (haven't checked yet).
I'm working on it for OO.

Thanks for working on the TAL LV2 collection, and Highlife.
These nicely compliment and expand the established sonic
possibilities in linux. When I get a new cpu/motherboard,
I look forward to trying your KX Studio.
Cheers

It works!

I compiled what was the latest DISTRHO code last night and was delighted to see that Highlife LV2 both saves and restores its samples OK under the latest qtractor svn version! Excellent work falktx - you are the man!

Having been following Linux audio for 16 years and never having been happy with any of the sampler solutions this was a BIG event for me and I felt like I'd discovered the philosophers stone of Linux audio plugins or something!

I've not done much testing of Highlife LV2 yet but one issue with this initial version is that saving qtractor sessions is pretty sluggish right now. Even if you only have the one HL plugin using track containing one small (1MB) sample it takes a good 20s or so to save the session for some reason- this is on a 64bit, dual-core laptop. However, its not all bad as at least HL LV2 sessions load at the normal rate.

falktx tells me has has had success using the VST build of HL under Renoise but I've failed to get any HL VST using sessions to successfully load under both the latest qtractor svn (compiled with the Steinberg VST headers) or the latest OOM git. I haven't been able to test either version of the plugin under a recent Ardour 3 as its not building for me under AV Linux 5.0.3 atm but I have no doubt they'll get that sorted soon.

It'll be interesting to see if A3 suffers similar delays in saving HL LV2 sessions.

Just wanted to chime in and say that I use highlife in renoise (av linux distro user here) and works no problem.