Hi all!

Why not tell us a little bit about yourself? Welcome to the community!

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johanna
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2018 6:45 pm

Hi all!

Post by johanna »

Not sure how to best introduce myself, so I thought I'd start with somewhat of a success story!
I've recently bought an IK iRig Keys I/O 25 and managed to hook it up to my laptop running Debian with KXStudio repositories under Qubes (it's complicated, ask me if you want :P). Everything seems to be working well, done a few recordings of my guitar, it seems to work well as an audio interface. What's more, it came with SampleTank 3 which is some kind of virtual instrument library (I'm pretty new to all this, so bare with me if I'm using the wrong technical terms) and I've successfully managed to install and authorize it and use it as a plugin in Ardour using Carla's export as LV2. It wasn't *that* much of a hassle, though I had some hiccups along the way. I still haven't gotten Ardour to save the settings inside SampleTank 3 between sessions, but it seems I can do that internally in the plugin's GUI so it's not that much of a problem.

This being said, maybe it's apparent that I'm quite new to music production but not at all unfamiliar with Linux. I've been a Linux user for almost 20 years now I think, and have made some very small contributions to the kernel. As for music, I've always been interested in music and approached it from different angles during my life. Right now I'm focusing mostly on songwriting and trying to work my guitar and singing skills up to being able to perform confidently. But I thought that now that I'm starting to write songs actually worth recording I might as well learn to make sketches/outlines of what kind of arrangement I imagine should I ever take them to a real studio to record :)

This will have to do as an introduction since the kids are calling on my attention. Yes, I'm trying to balance my life between kids, work, tech and music and to be honest music has been on the back burner for far too long. Time to change that now though!

Best Regards,
Johanna
jonetsu
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Re: Hi all!

Post by jonetsu »

Hi,

Welcome to LM. I use Sample Tank 3, amongst other Windows VST, as well as native Linux plugins. I found that a simple way to run Windows VST is by using wine-staging and linvst. I hesitated a lot before using Windows plugins since there were so many posts here and on other sites from people having installation problems, running problems, and devising ways to work around these. When doing music I wanted to do that, music, and not spending time figuring out software. Enough of that in the work place. Finally I found linvst and gave it a try. It simply works by having a .so file that has the same name as the Windows .dll plugin. The Linux DAW sees the .so file which in turn by means of wine-staging loads the Windows plugin. This is very simple, supporting a good array of Windows plugins. The ones with complex protection scheme or that does not install well or does not run, I simply drop. That's the disclaimer with this approach. If the demo does not run well, then it's OK, I do not pursue it further. There are enough plugins that works to keep busy learning them well.

So if you want to go beyond ST3 and use other Windows plugins you might want to give wine-staging (not the regular wine provided by the distro) and linvst a try. I compiled lnvst, it's quite easy. And there's ubuntuuser here in LM who is in linvst development.

You can listen to some of the music I make from the links provided in the signature below.

Cheers.
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