audiomixing in linux – setting up stuff

So, there are some updates on my away-from-apple project.

I successfully managed to get all my plugins to Windows, since my purchases included not only AU files but also Windows VST versions. Lucky me! Unluckily, i ran into some problems with Ardour crashing in Windows. Nothing i came up with helped. Finally i called for help in the Ardour Community and within minutes i got a response that solved my problem. Thanks again, guys!
Unfortunately the 64bit version of Ardour doesn’t load 32bit VSTs. So i was pointed to jbridge. But i didn’t manage to port my 32s to 64s successfully by now. So here is some work to be done for me. (Update: Don’t know exactly what i did wrong the first time but my 32bit VSTs have now been successfully jbridged.

On the other hand i discoverd carla by kxstudio. This is a kind of Linux pendant to ddmf meta-plugin. It loads VST (32 AND 64bits) into a rack that itself is a LV2– or LinuxVST-plugin. Apart from some mishaps of the GUIs of the plugins, the effects itself work pretty well so far. I found some nice free VST plugins to play around with and thanks to Wine even got my Sonalksis plugins to run in carla. Apart from waves, which needs ilok, i have many possibilities from the Windows-world in Linux.

a big bummer is still the missing full latency compensation in Ardour.

While speaking of latency: I ran into some weird effects by using Carla. i wanted to compensate the missing bus latency by exporting my drumbus and loading the stemfile as a new track. to check for phase issues, i switched phase of the stemtrack nd played both, bus and stem. No sound at all meant that these two were phase perfect. That’s what i expected. Then i put Carla with a VST compressor into the stemtrack to test parallel processing … and ran into som serious phasing.
My first thought was, that Ardours track latency compensation has a bug. i asked the Ardour community and got a response from Paul Davis (creator of Ardour) himself. He pointed, that the compensation on tracks should work. So i tested with another plugin (which i should have tried BEFORE asking the community!) and with the Calf compressor, everything was fine.
Next step was to ask falko coelho (creator of Carla) if he knows anything about latency issues within Carla. He responded within two minutes and said, that some VST have a latency that Carla can’t report to the host. So working with VSTs in Ardour will be try and error to test latency of plugins.

To sum it up: on the one hand there are some issues that make production in linux not as easy as with commercial products (yet).
On the other hand, there are great people working on great products that i believe will solve all problems some time. The community is awesome and very fast in response. Even if they can’t help you solving all your problems (yet) they provide usefull workarounds. And finaly Paul Davis made a point by stating, that the big DAW names struggled a long time with full latency compensation and that great records were made nevertheless.

Sidenote: To run carla as a plugin, you have to copy the LV folder into the folder that holds all LVs. if you know it, it’s pretty obvious but it took me a little to think of it.

 

cheers eighty