Music composer, game designer and cybermancer.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

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  • Welcome and congrats on your migration under GNU/Linux.

    VST is a proprietary format therefore it is made to not work on linux. On linux synth or virtual instruments are LV2 plugins (like Helm, Surge or Vitalium) or SF2/SFZ soundbank (played with Sfizz or Fluid Synth).

    Now Ardour, Bitwig and Reaper can load VST plugins, but :

    • Some won’t just work,
    • Some will work pretty much the same (Kontakt seems to be working for some person, but it depends on the version I think), BUT if the VSTs needs to be installed before hand (like Kontakt, Spitfire, SINE and I think Arturia V falls into that), you will have to install them first using Wine (or with a wine front-end, like Bottles, Heroic, Lutris). Then load them in your DAW, if they don’t work there after being properly download and installed, I don’t think there is anything much to do… … Apart from try using a bridge (like Lin-VST or Yabridge), but here against results are still very unpredictable. I got some pretty god results with both on the past, but on my new setup none would work for my plugins (Spitfires mostly).

    These companies won’t make their plugins available under Linux cause ‘there isn’t enough people using it on linux’ (words of someone at Spitfire who I was asking the question).

    My workflow for production in a few words :

    • One PC (recording, mixing, mastering) with a midi keyboard,
    • One PC virtual instruments only, I use it when project requires lot of instrument tracks.

    Edit : Yeah Carla can be used as well, it can load VST plugins and act like a plugin library (pretty much like Kontakt).