Linux public beta (4408)

[R.A.W.]

Hi there,
I just joined the Linux music world as I recently bought Bitwig on the current sale. I am hoping to slowly move from Win to Linux. The only thing that was making me still use Win was making music with Live9 (and work unfortunately ).

As I own most u-he plugins they were the first plugins I installed.. starting with rev3297, yesterday I installed rev3305. Up to now everything works just fine for me and I didn't run into any issues yet (Kubuntu 14.04 x64, AMD Phenom II X4 955, Steinberg UR22, tried ALSA first and since yesterday using JACK with Bitwig 1.1.5).

Will theme support be added in the future? I am used to different looks for the plugins on Win7.. no big deal, just asking.

Btw. I still have trouble compiling vst-bridge. First I tried the pre-compiled package by falkTX but that seems to be outdated (couldn't find the bridge maker). But I'm working through the errors until it will work.

[abique]

Hi R.A.W.,

Welcome to the Linux users
I think they should work. Can you tell me which theme you installed and where did you install it?
Also I'm the author of vst-bridge.

Cheers.

[StudioDave]

Hi there,
I just joined the Linux music world ...

Greetings, salutations, and welcome aboard !

You're coming in at a good time. The Linux audio/MIDI infrastructure is well-defined and deployed across distributions, JACK is a mature system, and there are some excellent distros - KXStudio, AVLinux, PlanetCCRMA, Dream Studio, MusiX, and others - that focus on media creation/edition.

As that glokraw guy will surely mention, there are some very nice open-source applications, utilities, and plugins already available for Linux that you might find helpful and/or interesting. FalkTX, the developer of the KXStudio distro, has done some terrific work designing various utilities that can significantly enhance your workflow.

Obviously, you've also arrived at a time when commercial interest in Linux has surged. Bitwig and u-he may not exactly constitute a deluge of offerings, but it's worthwhile to note that the commercial stuff for Linux musicians isn't bad at all: Pianoteq, Renoise, Mixbus, Bitwig, OverToneDSP, discoDSP, all make very good software. The u-he ports came out of nowhere, I never expected to see such a wonderful group of plugins available for Linux, yet here they are. (Now we need to persuade George Reales to convert all of his discoDSP synths to Linux versions !)

I still have trouble compiling vst-bridge. First I tried the pre-compiled package by falkTX but that seems to be outdated (couldn't find the bridge maker). But I'm working through the errors until it will work.

I prefer phantom_one's Airwave, you might want to give it some attention:

https://github.com/phantom-code/airwave

Discussion here:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 9&t=415929

Best of luck with your new adventure !

dp

[R.A.W.]

Hi all and thanks for the warm welcome to the linux audio community!
abique, I already saw that you are the author of vst-bridge. But I won't use this thread to troubleshoot my issues with it. I'm not new to Linux but I still need to google my way to some of the "special" tasks with audio.

@StudioDave: Airwave looks interesting.. though I'm an IT person and am used to work with command line, I like GUIs or wizards. Seems Airwave provides it.

I think they should work. Can you tell me which theme you installed and where did you install it?

It seems to be a bug in the code about paths. I just copied the files from my Win7 (dual-boot). See screenshot.

I just tried again with the Divalicious skin. When I looked at the Theme folder I found that the plugin created a subfolder "Scripts\" (note the backslash at the end). I copied the "Diva.txt" file to it and tried to activate the skin. A Folder "Images\" was created. After I copied all necessary files to it, the skin worked.

I had a look into the Zebra2 and MFM2 folder and it's the same there.. seems to be a common issue with the compiles.

[R.A.W.]

I prefer phantom_one's Airwave, you might want to give it some attention:
https://github.com/phantom-code/airwave

Compiling it leads to the same error as with vst-bridge. I got issues with g++, when I tried fixing them it got even worse.
Now build-essential and several other packages are marked "broken"... still working on fixing this, otherwise I will just restore the backup I made yesterday.

EDIT:
After an odyssee of restoring my backup and installing several libs I finally got Airwave to compile and it's working (sorry, abique, but I like the GUI for creating the bridges ). This dependency stuff is unfortunately the part which still makes Linux hard for the average guy when trying "special usages".. luckily I'm not average when it comes to computers.
I already got 3 Audio Damage plugins to run fine.. continuing with some others which I can't live without - MicroTonic3 and CamelPhat3 (yes, I know, but I stick to all my CA plugs)!
And then I call it a day and watch TV before trying to install some more tomorrow.

[stone1]

Yes - well the way I was testing it was loading the windows Podolski plugin using vst-bridge. Set a pattern to play one of the preset patches in renoise, then load podolski native linux plugin, select the same patch and it will be 1 octave lower.

Edit: and this is with the latest version of the plugins too.

Sorry for the noise on this - I just installed the latest windows Podolski (3304) and it is exactly the same as the Linux version - was previously using an earlier version, and something must have changed with the patches.

[glokraw]

Hi there,
I just joined the Linux music world

Welcome to kvr. Save yourself! Go here:
http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2015/

A few hours on the autobahn is the best way
to find out wie tief ist das kimchi
Cheers

[R.A.W.]

Hi there,
I just joined the Linux music world

Welcome to kvr.

Thanks, but I'm not new to kvr, see my post count and join date . I'm only relatively new to making music on linux.
Anyway, I might be there, but Mainz is a fairly long way from Hamburg. In the meantime I stick around here to get the news about u-he linux versions and Camel Audio no-news.

Sorry for getting off-topic!
On topic now @ abique: let me know if you need anything else besides my description above

[glokraw]

Some good news, in new qtractor 6.5 I have just used filterscape, uhbik, and Zebra2.

There were and are still some issues, but with workarounds,
thanks to the dev, Rui Nuno Capela, providing some tips.
To use Filterscape, Uhbik, and Zebra2, in qtractor,
with all the content provided with the installers, remove
any other vsts in the /home/you/.u-he, and then turn off
the 'dummy' scan option in qtractor menu
view->options, choose plugin tab, untick 'dummy'

Now rename /home/you/.vst while testing, (to guard against
old buggy plugins that could crash the new
qtractor vst-shell support) and remove that path
from qtractors list, and add three new vst paths,
using the plugins tab,
click the yellow 'open folder' icon in the upper right,
browse to the path (right-click to enable the hidden files)
and add these paths:
/home/you/.uhe/Filterscape
/home/you/.uhe/Uhbik
/home/you/.uhe/Zebra2
Now, the add plugin routine in the Track Properties panel
will find and display the many plugins found in the three folders.

(Carla can still use your temporarily renamed .vst folder)

Perhaps some fixes will occur soon, (it was not long between
6.4 and 6.5) to fix the path and link issues. Maybe falkTX
will rampage code to catch up with a new Carla. Love
competition and choices

Based on experiences on a gray haired computer, if you have graphics issues running multiples/instances, use a simple window manager, and turn off as much eye candy as you can, and start Zebra first.
Cheers

[glokraw]

Hi there,
I just joined the Linux music world

Welcome to kvr.

Thanks, but I'm not new to kvr, see my post count and join date .

My shrink said attention to detail was my strong point.
I now think she was just poking fun at me
I'll just blame it on not having had coffee at the time,
even though I know better...
Cheers

[glokraw]

Perhaps some fixes will occur soon, (it was not long between
6.4 and 6.5)
Cheers

Already fixed in a git version!

[glokraw]

And another qtractor update. Gettin' pretty solid
Bitwig better get Tom back

[kmatheussen]

Hi,

Great work.

However, you probably want to compile the plugins with the -fPIC flag. If not it becomes impossible to run more than around 10 (I guess, don't know the exact number) plugin types (_types_, not instances) at once (if all of them are compiled without -fPIC). The reason is that the static TLS (thread local storage) space becomes full and the hosts will get this error: "dlopen: cannot load any more object with static TLS".

I'm the author of the Radium host, and in Radium it's likely that you can't run the u-he plugin at all, since radium keeps all library handles open all the time (not just when needed). And since quite many LADSPA plugins are compiled without the -fPIC flag as well, there isn't enough TLS space left when trying to load VST plugins. I'm going to fix this though, but it's not unlikely that other hosts are designed the same way.

I don't know the details about TLS though. But from googling around it seems like plugins shouldn't use static TLS. But maybe you have a good reason for doing so. (Or maybe there is a different reason for having static TLS in the plugin than lack of -fPIC flag, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's best if it static TLS can be avoided.)

Best,
Kjetil

[abique]

Hey kmatheussen,
Thanks for the very detailed report.
The plugins are already compiled with -fPIC.
For the TLS, I don't know if/why/where we use it. I'm going to check that.
Also I do not understand the link between -fPIC and the TLS? Isn't -fPIC required to build a shared library?
Cheers,
Alex.

[kmatheussen]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yes, you are probably right that -fPIC is required, at least on 64 bit platforms. The problem is something else.

But I've googled some more, and it seems like Fedora 20 has a very low limit on the number of dynamic libraries that can be loaded at once using thread local storage.[1] If I understand correctly, the limit is 14. Coincidentally, I used a Fedora 20 computer when testing your plugin (just tried the Uhbik plugin so far). Your plugin loads in Radium on other computers. I have also tried to not keep the library handles for LADSPA plugin in memory all the time. But that didn't help. Seems like if you load it once (which is done during program startup to get hold of the plugin names which are stored in the library files), the slot is taken. So what I'm going to do, is to detect this error when loading a plugin, and then just show a help window giving suggestions what to do. The safest solution is probably just to upgrade to a newer version of fedora. (Another possible solution is to load VST plugins before LADSPA plugins.)

On your part, it might work to use the "-ftls-model=global-dynamic" compiler option for the plugins, but I don't know if it will work. I guess it could lower the performance on the use of thread local variables if you use them a lot.

I'm sorry I don't have much more information. I've tried to find out about this, but it doesn't seem to be much information out there. Most of the hits are people using Matlab with the same problem on fedora 20. But no solution.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2654 ... -fedora-20