Running commercial audio software on linux

[tor.helge.skei]

looks like some audio damage stuff might be coming to linux too:



https://twitter.com/Chris_Randall/statu ... 7394333696

[glokraw]

Reason 11 Intro Rack plugin in Linux? You bet!!!

So in windoze Reaper and wine-staging 2.17,
I've got a bunch these Reason instruments and effects
running. In the vsti 3 rack, as I type, there is:
Europa synth
Thor synth
Subtractor synth
NN-XT sampler with grand piano
Dr Octo-Rex playing some jaunty rex loop beats
RPG-8 arpeggiator (just idling because I'm tired,
and dumb as a bag of hammers... )

and in the vst 3 effects rack,

CF-101 Chorus-Flanger
RV7000 Mk II reverb

It's not perfect, as scrolling the rack is not very fluid
(which could just be a local trouble)
and I'm still Sergeant Schulz in the Strudel shop,
but most of it is working, tons of synth presets,
parameter control, and flipping to the backside for Reason's
iconic cable connecting, seems fine, and it's here now as a vsti/vst.
Browsing for your own samples/loops etc may be iffy,
but theres 3 gig of content included, so few worries at this price.
And wine/reaper keep getting better.

At $99 retail (I had a 15 % off coupon, so paid $85)
I took a runner, hoping it would work in linux sometime
in the next few years...little did I know it's already run a green light.

I made an account at www.reasonstudios.com, registered
the serial and authorization numbers received from the shop,
and am running in 'internet activation mode',
rather than being locked to a single computer,
(which might not work, anyway, as some utility might be needed.)
So the internet connection is in play. When launching the plugin,
it prompts for a password, and then it's off to the playground.

I admit to the included Europa Synth pushing me over the $edge$,
as I was low on cash when it was released at a discount price.
It sounded great, and worked in my wine setup, but not my wallet.
But the Reason 11 Intro is both packed and priced to tempt purchases,
and lead to upgrades. Over 20 effects and instruments, with
around 6 or 7 utilities, so around 4 bucks each at the $99 retail.
Probably a ton of youtubes for the older Thor, Subtractor, NN-XT etc,
and the Reason way of producing. etc etc

https://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-aud ... o-download

I'm using an i7 2600, four 3.4 ghz cores, reaper configured for
7 of 8 threads towards plugins, and an oldish nvidia video card,
qjackctl shows 20-44 % cpu depending on how fast/how many keys are struck.

Am I delighted? (and lucky also to be
a decent chef with rice and beans and tea, which I'll be eating
a lot of, and of which I'm now going to feast upon
Cheers

[imrae]

Is the Reason standalone working as well? I'm finding the lack of real-time sampling to be a bit of a pain in the plugin.

[glokraw]

Hi, I had no luck with the standalone. In the wine terminal output,
I see these items below as missing (the ones with a # have been problematic
in other over-ride quests, they seem pretty deeply entwined in the
msoft bowl of pasta code.)

#api-ms-win-core-shlwapi-legacy-l1-1-0.dll
#api-ms-win-core-com-midlproxystub-l1-1-0.dll
#PROPSYS.dll
api-ms-win-core-datetime-l1-1-2.dll
api-ms-win-shcore-sysinfo-l1-1-0.dll
MFPlat.DLL
mfplat.dll
MFReadWrite.dll

I suspect the #'s will be a no-go until some freakishly cool game
requires them, and get's the wine team into some serious digging.
They're making great progress, as it is.
Jack Winter, and osxmidi might know things along those lines,
they post pretty often at

https://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52

Cheers

[audiojunkie]

AudioAssault, a busy plugin designer are adding linux vst versions,
starting with a nice reverb. I use their GrindMachine ampSims
to make the cat dance like J-Lo (well, after it lets go of
the ceiling )
Great to see new products coming

https://audioassault.mx/blogs/LinuxVST%20Available

Looks like a $5 intro price, $35 later

Cheers

Nice!! I've got their drum apps for Windows. I hope they port them over to Linux!!

[glokraw]

There is a current IK Multimedia promotion,

https://www.ikmultimedia.com/news/?item_id=8502

edit: if you buy an irigkeysio49 midi controller at $299,
they throw in Sampletank 4 Max, and it already comes with
SampleTank 3, a Miroslav Philharmonik 2, a T-Racks Deluxe
of some vintage, some iOS versions of the above,
and the ubiquitous if not obligatory Ableton Live Lite V.10

I installed the Miroslav standalone and plugin in my oldish
Mint 18, with recent wine-staging 4.19, and latest win reaper,
and it's working fine after a brief test.

It's much like a zynaddsubfx/yoshimi, except playing
quality orchestral samples, instead of synth sounds.
It is 16 part multi-timbral, and has articulations on some of
the main instruments, the lowest keys are mapped to switch
among the articulations with a keypress, worked fine on the
cellos, trumpet and flute. It also has the IK multi-effects,
so a lot of sound control is at hand. I really like having
a good harp, marimba, piano, and classical guitar at the ready,
among so many others, the standalone .exe is also sounding great with linux effects rakarrack/calf etc

I installed the latest Ampltube 4 while in the neighborhood,
also working well. Each came with a Custom Shop for testing
and buying gear at the IK store, and simple serial # copy/paste
to register in the IK Authorization manager.
The soundset for ST4 Max is over 200 gig, and it will probably work as well, but I'm out of disk space I did have an earlier
ST4 SE version installed and running,
but it was old, and needed some IK code enhancements

The new ST4 V 4.08 seems well behaved for most customers,
some of whom took to the warpath over a buggy initial
release of V 4. The SampleTank 3 sounds are part of the
SampleTank 4 downloads, and integrated in the preset/tagging browser. As are Syntronik sounds, if you own that, or have the
free version.

There are many youtubes of IK products, It's all a very cozy environ to layer some tracks, wrap them with fx, and get them ready
for the boombox. Or the tea room, for the harp & viola crowd.

There is a huge amount of supporting content, and the license fine print makes it clear that IK want it to be owned by one user,
and not divied up later. The actual midi controller is set up for
pads and knobs etc to interact with the ST4 software, and includes
a nice hi-res audio interface for mic/guitar work. The deal has been
extended from Oct 31st, to the end of November, in case
Santa has plenty of disk space
Cheers

[fedexnman]

Hopefully now that Apple has crapped on everyone with Catalina it'll open the door for more Linux VSTs and DAWs ... and Audio interfaces that are USB class complaint and driver free and open .....

[glokraw]

Pretty shocking when almost every major plugin dev website leads with
some cautionary blurb about eating the spoiled fruit. Glennbo at the reaper
linux forum just purchased a nice pi kit, which he'll be reviewing
once assembled and linuxified. More hardware, more ARM, more linux,
good times coming...
Cheers

[glokraw]

The latest SynthMaster 2.9x and SynthMaster One 1.34
are working in linux/wine-staging(with some over-rides)/reaper

Each synth has a midi out, and they make handy drummers.
Attached is a 1 min loop, an arp preset from each synth
playing MT Power drumkit and/or HG Fortunes Drumburst
( forgetful ) Drumburst also has a handy midi out.

Soundsets for the synths are on sale for $4 for awhile,
with some great sound designers on board like BigTone.
Cheers

[glokraw]

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=534950

New stripes on the King Zebra!!! V2.9 beta, with new features,
and a generous discount through 12-04-19
And a coupon for a different U-he product can be requested
if you already own Zebra2.

The linux build is still a few weeks off, but a great chance to get one of the
worlds greatest synthesizers at a very nice price. Free update to current Z2 license holders, who can request a coupon for the discount on a different U-he product

For those unfamiliar, Zebra comes with a very large collection of presets,
and there exists a huge number of free presets, created over many years,
and links can be found at this U-he website discussion:

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=180090

And there is a nice youtube channel with dozens of videos,
and more in the general halls of the tube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIuy1V ... OaouR5PT_w

A net search for "Dan Worrall" youtube

will also prove beneficial, he is a great tutorialist.

[audiojunkie]

Cool!!!

[glokraw]

I'm not a coder. I take wild guesses sometimes. Using wine to get
commercial windows software running in linux, if I see that a .dll
appears in terminal output after a plugin fails to operate,
I look at the .dll provided by wine, for example, if it is 30k in size, while the real version is perhaps 300, or 700 k, I might
'guess' that the real one might be needed, and then use the
search engines or forums to verify if the small version should be
replaced with a real version, and a 'wine over-ride' entered in to the
winecfg libraries gui that handles such things.

But wine keeps getting better and better, and the number of
wine system .dll's that are far smaller than the real counterparts
found in an actual windows system has been shrinking. So I decided
on a little test: Install Native Access, and then install and authorize
Reaktor from Native Access, and then install and authorize
some Reaktor based instruments from Native Access.

The result was pretty amazing to me. Using wine-staging 4.20
in a linux called Mint 18 (V19 is the current version) only
three extra .dll files were needed, and configured as
'over-rides', followed by choosing windows 10 as the version
being presented to windows installers in the winecfg panel.***

Each piece of software required several steps and commands,
to cajol linux into properly dealing with Native Instruments
.iso files. Only the name of the software to be installed
is changed in the commands, so it will become a drill
if you choose to install lots of their software in one go.
I'll post those steps in the near future, but like me,
you can likely get the needed info to get started at
the LinVst website,

https://github.com/osxmidi/LinVst

whose boss coder, 'osxmidi' has discovered many of the details
while improving his excellent vst wrapper utility.
***The folder called 'Waves' opens a detailed tutorial for that
product line, and I used the same .dll's he mentioned,
in my test to install the Reaktor items. The main text on
the front page also is full of tips that might get your favorite
windows vst running in linux. Referring to it often
will be good luck!
Cheers

[glokraw]

Here are the steps to install a Native Instruments product
that arrives as a .iso file. This was in linux Mint 18,
with wine-staging 4.21 (edit -actually, it's V 4.20).
I'll use the great Reaktor ensemble
'Rounds' as the example. Note the " " in the commands are needed
to process empty spaces in the command-paths/content titles)

Start Native Access:

wine "/home/you/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Native Instruments/Native Access/Native Access.exe"

In Native Access, select the purchased but not yet installed Rounds.

NA will begin downloading the item, and then report failure.
Actually, the download itself does complete,
find it with this command:

cd /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Downloads

then command: ls (you will then see the Rounds.iso file)

Make a place to access the Rounds.iso content:

sudo mkdir /mnt/rounds

Access the .iso content:

cd /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/you/Downloads

sudo mount -t udf Rounds.iso -o unhide /mnt/rounds

The system will respond to success with:

'mount: /dev/loop0 is write-protected, mounting read-only'

Now, go to the folder holding the contents of the .iso:

cd /mnt/rounds

ls (this now displays the mac and pc installers that are in the .iso)

Run the installer:

cd /mnt/Rounds

wine "Rounds 1.2.0 Setup PC.exe"

When the installer completes, close and relaunch Native Access.
(edit: it may take a few moments for Native Access to verify
the successful install, and move your purchase to the installed
panel).
If after some time, your Rounds is still not in the installed panel,
copy it's serial number from your
Native Instruments account page, and in Native Access,
click the 'add serial number' widget. Those last steps may vary,
depending on if your purchase was second-hand, part of a bundle,
or if the mood of Native Access at the time was dubious.

I would suggest storing serial number, .iso and .exe
for each product, somewhere with easy access,
for good luck in the future.
Cheers

[glokraw]

I should mention that the above commands are a bit more verbose
than the actual process needs be. It helps to open Native Access
in it's own terminal, and the other commands from a second terminal.
The bash-history (prior commands accessible by up-arrow key)
means the longer commands to visit the .wine download directory,
and to mount the .iso, can be used for second and third and fourth etc
NI products, should you obtain them, just by changing the names
of the product. You can copy/paste that series of command to a handy textfile,
for use should another purchase take place down the road, like the summer sale,
or from kvr marketplace etc
Cheers

[glokraw]

The good news, after clearing out 80 gig of disk space,
I ran the Kontakt 6.21 installer,
via native Access, and surprisingly,
it completed in one operation, without the above
hoopla and command sessions. (edit; I do not know why, I'll snoop
around later ) I then installed the new Play Series libraries,
Hybrid Keys, Ethereal Earth, and Analog Dreams, and the West Africa library
(which gets great reviews for it's functionalities). Each of these required
the extra steps, but so far, everything gets done and left in working order.

I have K6 running in wine/Reaper at the moment,
with a West Africa library flute, using a little Replika reverb,
and the linux hydrogen drum machine playing
a gamelan pattern, with Timemachine recorder ready to record them.

I'm the ultimate Kontakt novice, but have a trove of videos to learn from.
The reaper plugin screen placement and sizing are too futzy, had to fiddle
a bit to get the Hybrid Keys, and Analog Dreams libs gui's to fit the
horizontal, but it's a 17" monitor in 2019
I rarely need to adjust reaper screens for any plugin, so after playtime,
more reading...
Cheers