Running commercial audio software on linux

[glokraw]

Native Instruments kept their Christmas gift policy alive for the un-naughty of 2020, I just made barely the cut
somehow

It's a nice four octave Chinese Yangqin 'dulcimer' for the free Kontakt Player, that arrives as a 975 meg iso, so the refresher-course of installing in wine for Reaper made me dig up some old text files but it all came back to me eventually. It will be a treat to blend in with songs still lacking a lil sumpin sumpin

Yangqin-be-jammin'.png

It has 14 ethnic instruments full of articulations and nuance, and a chromatic mode called default, for more western creative bents. Gonna have to practice the turns and trills and runs

[landfiets2020]

Hi

I would like to try Spectrasonics Omnisphere in Linux.
Are there people who use it like that allready? I could use yabridge in this case. But before I do the plunge I would like to know if anyone here has done it succesfully. I have a registred version. Maybe someone can help me.

Happy Newyear

[glokraw]

I have read posts from people using Omnisphere in linux, so it's worth trying. If you have

Reaper (a free covid version is on their site, or the 60 day demo will do)

LinVst (or yabridge, which I've heard good things about, but not tried yet)

Wineasio from KX-Studio repository (or a debian package site)

Wine-staging from wineHQ v 5.22 or newer (6.04 is current)

(you can't mix wine-staging with a typical distro wine)

you might be successful. Pretty sure wine and reaper are included in the latest AVLinux debian-based distro, a 64 gig or larger usbstick/sd-card is a good cheap testbed to try AVLinux.

There is a topic over at

https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=22482

relating to Kontakt, but probably useful for Omnisphere as well.

Do you have any U-he synths? The linux ports work great, and there is the linux Yoshimi variant of Zynaddsubfx, 16 part multi-timbral, built in effects, and the Folderol Collection of sounds has some great pads and sundries to layer, until Omni is at your fingertips.
Cheers

[landfiets2020]

I allready use Bitwig and Spectrasonics software so I will try that first in Linux. Manjaro will be my distro of choice. So wine-staging is a different wine?

[glokraw]

You'll have to check which wine versions are available in your distro.
There is a nice Manjaro guide page, that shows the different install
commands for pacman:

https://linuxconfig.org/install-wine-on-manjaro

and then:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/bitwig-studio/

www.winehq.org provide wine-stable and wine-staging, and both
are considered more experimental than desired by some distro-maintainers,
who keep older versions in their repositories, and later on someone
inevitably installs parts of both old and new, creating a train-wreck.
The staging version has the latest fixes and experimental patches,
and I have had only a couple of regression issues in the last several years,
easily cured by reverting to the previous version, for a few weeks. A Kontakt user
joined the wine team at some point, which has helped quite a bit.

'Winetricks' is not supported or recommended by wineHQ, and most of what
it does is well within the grasp of most Arch users, just finding things by search-engine, and then installing them isn't difficult.

For general musician use, AVLinux and Ubuntu Studio are good choices,
but you have a sharp focus on Spectrasonics, and it looks like things
are in place for Arch to go for it. If issues appear, I can verify that Reaper
does not leave teeth-marks, if needed occasionally

[coolblinger]

I allready use Bitwig and Spectrasonics software so I will try that first in Linux. Manjaro will be my distro of choice. So wine-staging is a different wine?

If you're curious, I explained what Wine Staging is and why you probably want to use it here: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge ... -751131188

And if you run into issues setting up yabridge, don't hesitate to PM/mail me, and we also have a support channel on the Discord (that makes things a bit easier than sending messages back and forth ).

[glokraw]

That's a great explanation of wine-staging. Your support replies
in general are excellent. Extra mile territory, to be sure!

I wonder if in your (precious) spare time, you could do a screencast that would show a typical install routine of yabridge, and then using it to bridge a folder of plugins? The link below has a screencast roundup with
links and install commands for each one. Or a cellphone-over-shoulder
video, or a typical list of install commands etc would also be cool.

https://itsfoss.com/best-linux-screen-recorders/

I look forward to learning yabridge in the year ahead.
( A year should do it, I'm a touch slow at some things )
I'll be reading at

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

in the meantime...
Cheers

[coolblinger]

That's a great explanation of wine-staging. Your support replies
in general are excellent. Extra mile territory, to be sure!

I wonder if in your (precious) spare time, you could do a screencast that would show a typical install routine of yabridge, and then using it to bridge a folder of plugins? The link below has a screencast roundup with
links and install commands for each one. Or a cellphone-over-shoulder
video, or a typical list of install commands etc would also be cool.

https://itsfoss.com/best-linux-screen-recorders/

I look forward to learning yabridge in the year ahead.
( A year should do it, I'm a touch slow at some things )
I'll be reading at

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

in the meantime...
Cheers

This small section of the readme (the Usage and Automatic setup parts) should be sufficient in getting up and running. If they're not, then please let me know so we can try to improve there! Another user installs yabridge as part of a larger video , but I'm personally not a huge fan of videos/screencasts if it can also be easily explained in text since text is often shorter and also easier to search or scan through.

[glokraw]

I think I almost downloaded that video a couple of nights ago
Been that kind of year, and it's only January 4th

The good news is that I studied the readme, downloaded and figured out
where to put the files, and had a successful first run*. I made a vst
'torture folder' with old, new, and difficult plugins, (names witheld to protect the innocent), some old synthedit gems with some .dlls in the data folder, and some on the outside. All showed up in the next Reaper scan.

* There was one issue, probably a wine/linux issue, the first time I ran
the sync option, nothing happened, and the terminal output said it could not find 'winedump'. In Ubuntu Studio 20.04, I have the wine-staging linked from /opt to /usr/lib
and I can start win executables like

wine /home/me/.wine/drive_c/users/reaper.exe

instead of using the full path from /opt

After I copied winedump to /usr/bin the 'yabridgectl sync' command worked, and the .so files started arriving. I'll check out the video in the morning. Oh, wait...it IS the morning, how time flies when you're having a good time

[coolblinger]

Yabridgectl uses winedump to be able to detect whether a .dll file is a Windows VST2 plugin or some arbitrary other file, and it does the same thing with .vst3 modules and it also uses it to figure out the module's architecture (although within yabridge itself I've manually implemented that check by parsing the .dll file's headers so you don't have a runtime dependency on winedump). That way it can skip over all files that are not actual plugins, and it can create proper merged VST3 bundles. On every distro I'm aware of winedump is installed along with Wine itself though (except for when using the Wine version in Debian/Ubuntu default repos, but those Wine versions are outdated anyways so you're much better off using WineHQ's repos there).

Oh and on Ubuntu the winehq-staging package will create and maintain all of those symlinks for you.

[landfiets2020]

I will post here later what went fine or went wrong with this whole install. I am still deciding *lol*
So I will reply but it takes some time.
Thanks for the info so far.

[landfiets2020]

Btw what do you guys think of pipewire? Will that be the future?

[coolblinger]

Btw what do you guys think of pipewire? Will that be the future?

At some point, maybe. But considering that it took PulseAudio over a decade to get to a state where it 'just works' and works really well, and the fact that the PipeWire has already existed for five years and is still not in a state where the developers recommend using it as a daily driver, I'd say that replacing everything with PipeWire and having it work as well or better than things currently work is still far off. There are some people who have been using it as a JACK or PulseAudio replacement to varying levels of success, and Fedora's going to enable it by default in the next version (even though PipeWire's developers warned them not to), so it might already work fine for you. Just keep in mind that a lot of PulseAudio and JACK features have not been implemented yet, including things like latency compensation.

[glokraw]

An ad slipped through my youtube music searches, for the
Fresh Air plugin from Steven Slate, so I fired up AVLinux, on which I had a little recent success with the i-lok Software Manager.

After installing Fresh Air, and verifying it worked in Reaper in the wine staging 5.22 that comes with AVLinux, I rebooted, and launched the i-Lok Manager. It displayed all my activations from a win7 AIEP3, my recent linux activation for Hybrid 3 synth, and had Fresh Air waiting in the list. A little futzing later, after pressing the 'Activate' button had shown no visual effect, I turned on the 'Cloud' portion of my i-lok account, and was able to see that Fresh Air had been activated, although I had no gui confirmation that such an operation was successful. So I guess there is some linux luck in 2021. Rebooted again, and watched some Fresh Air videos, loaded up Reaper and started mastering the three-dial_one-button interface.

It's nicely colorful with a haze that appears in the corners as you turn up he two big knobs. The knobs can be ganged as desired, and there is a power (bypass) button on one side and a trim control on the other. I think sliders would be better in this case, for those who will move things often.

The amount of air you'll hear from the mids and highs buttons will vary with your audio signal, a decent drumkit with live-play dynamics, and you might convince yourself you notice the changes but it will be much more evident on pristine vocals lacking busy background parts, on some types of pads and leads, and enhancing isolated ambience, though with some subtlety. But that's something that will appeal to various creatives. It might also enliven some accoustic instruments or samples. I think I'll try in on those Raum diffuse reverb tails

HaveAnotheHit-of-.jpg

It's free for a while, so thanks Steven Slate for giving a nice tool that
doesn't demand a Mac or win10 to be enjoyed

[landfiets2020]

I ordered a Intel NUC10i7FNH, so I will be making Linux music in a few days.
My question. When I will use wine-staging, which .dll should I install and where.
I have no idea yet, since I am way long time gone from windows.