A little confused regarding necessary folder structure (Bitwig Studio/Debian)

[kurt008]

Hi together.
After quite some time I wanted to make another test of Cardinal (23.07) to see what currently works and whether the initial limitations, which made me leave Cardinal more than 1 year ago, are accessible now.

I somehow miss a clear statement, which structure Cardinal's folder has to be in order to give Cardinal's binaries a chance to find everything.
In a few online resources (mainly from Cardinal itself) there is the advice to "copy the complete folder of Cardinal to" ... .clap, -vst3,... etc.
But: When I try to open it inside Bitwig Studio, I got the message, that /usr/local/share/cardinal doesn't exist.... although there's not even a hint, that such a folder has to exist at all at this location... what the hell?

Is anyone out there, who uses Cardinal from a Debian system using a DAW (the CLAP or VST3 version) who was faced with this?
Is there a reliable information, what is needed exactly where?

It would be as simple as : "Create a folder named 'cardinal' inside ~/usr/local/share and unpack Cardinal-linux-x86_64-23.10.tar.gz there - this said: ~/usr/local/share should contain 10 folders (for the different plugin types as well as docs) and 5 files, a.o. README).

Unfortunately many apps/programs are made in a way, as if everybody has the time to fumble together a working system in something like a full-time-job, neglecting, that almost nobody has the time to achieve this and... because of that a lot of people prefer to take the money and simply buy something that works 'out-of-the-box'... making such efforts die out over time because a "lack of support".

[ath3yst]

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Hi Kurt,

Because I run into the same problem today I was looking for some solutions and found your thread. I knew it's a bit older but as you're still active and I've found the solution by myself I would like to let you know how I resolve it.
First of all, I'm also running Bitwig-Studio within Ubuntu-Studio.

So, what I've done is:
- Downloaded Cardinal-linux-x86_64-25.06.tar.gz and extracted the archive
- Copied the Cardinal.vst3 as well as the CardinalFX.vst3 into the folder $HOME/.vst3/

and additionally:
- Cloned the Git-Reposity from github (git clone https://github.com/DISTRHO/cardinal (https://github.com/DISTRHO/cardinal))
- Created the missing subfolder (sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/cardinal)
- Copied the "patches" folder (sudo cp -r cardinal/patches /usr/local/share/cardinal/)
- Copied the "plugins" folder (sudo cp -r cardinal/plugins /usr/local/share/cardinal/)

That`s all I did and everything is working fine.

[NWSM]

Yes i do have Cardinal on Bitwig 5.3.13 on MX Linux (Debian based)
I think i manually drop it into the /.vst3 folder. Like Kurt also wrote.

My Folder for Cardinal is

/home/username*/.vst3/Cardinal.vst3

inculding

/Contents/Resources
/Contents/x86_64-linux

I don't have issues, but this message i saw before.
i think it was Audiothing, where the path for Presets was not in the Folder i wanted to have or i installed the Plugin. So i manually moved the Folders and tried to set it up inside the Plugin.

Have a look into this:

https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_d ... tions.html

and maybe open an Issue or Discussion on GitHub:

- https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/discussions

[paradiddle]

26.01 just dropped. https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/releases/tag/26.01