Carla + Fedora = no love?

Discuss running non-Linux applications and plugins on Linux, for example via wine

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Rainmak3r
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Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Rainmak3r »

Hi all,

I've started playing a bit with VST yesterday, and while I got most of them working with fst.exe or dssi-wine, apparently the packaged version of Carla on Fedora 30 doesn't ship VST support. Even enabling the Wine stuff in the Experimental settings, and updating the paths, it looks like the "carla-discovery-wine32" and "carla-discovery-wine64" tools are not available, and I can't see any package that provides them.

Is this indeed a known limitation on Fedora, which would require a manual installation of Carla to fix? I think both fst.exe and dssi-wine do cover my (limited) needs for the moment, but being able to get it working with Carla would have been nice.

Thanks!
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

This is why many people use the KXStudio repositories for music production on Linux. As far as I know, sadly, these repositories cannot be used w/ Fedora. One must have a Debian or Ubuntu based Linux distribution.
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by glowrak guy »

Rainmak3r wrote:Hi all,
I've started playing a bit with VST yesterday,
Thanks!
I suggest removing all the wine parts you have installed,
and installing wine-staging from winehq.org and manually
installing a wineasio.dll rpm, and register it to wine with commands

wine64 regsvr32 wineasio.dll and (not or)
wine regsvr32 wineasio.dll

and then install the linux Reaper daw demo from
www.reaper.fm

Reaper and Bitwig have the best vst support available to linux users,
but Bitwig is much more expensive.
Reaper comes as an archive that can be expanded
to it's folder, wherever you like, or there is an installer if you so choose

It is full featured for 60 days, and runs therafter on the honour system,
the non-pro price is $60, a great bargain for what it provides,
so a dollar saved per day while demoing, will buy you a license.

Then there is LinVst, a handy utility that wraps most windows plugins
as native-linux vsts that will run in Reaper and other linux daws.

https://github.com/osxmidi/LinVst
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by glowrak guy »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:This is why many people use the KXStudio repositories for music production on Linux. As far as I know, sadly, these repositories cannot be used w/ Fedora. One must have a Debian or Ubuntu based Linux distribution.
Even if a debian distro was secondary, it would still allow harvesting software packages
from kx repos, and using the alien command to convert them to rpm. I had near
100% success doing that in Fedora versions over the years. I did disable selinux
in those installs, not being very expert on security vs audio conflicts.
Who is this Pam girl, anyway? Never met the chic... :wink:
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Gps »

I am on openSUSE, and when I asked around on the suse forum about Carla, one person had compiled Carla himself.

He said is was not hard, you only needed allot of dev files.

When I tried the appimage version of LMMS with the Carla ( how call it ? ) self contained binary version, it did not work.
The openSUSE version of Carla did show in LMMS and worked to some extent, but it was not compiled with wine support, so it could not load vst.

Reply from LMMS devs was that it needed extra coding. ( in LMMS )

So if you wanna stay on Fedora, I think the best way is to use the appimage version of LMMS, and compile Carla yourself.
If you don't use lmms, just compiling Carla you're self is probably still the best way.


I have been wondering myself if I should switch to KxStudio. I have had so many issues on openSUSE, with LMMS and Carla, all because the package builders, don't really know LMMS nor Carla in detail.

One of the package builders I contacted explained to me they don't have the time to test all programs in detail.

So for LMMS as an example, they test if it starts, and if it does, they are done.
Then they need users like me, to tell them LMMS uses wine to load vst.

I love openSUSE and at one time, even got a licence person from suse to talk with a person from Valve about the steam license.

Great people at (open)SUSE, but all this takes allot of time away from me gaming and making music. :)

One thing I love about openSUSE is YAST, no other distro has this one place to do everything, from installing programs to changing boot settings.
( with the mouse)

OpenSUSE and fedora seem to be allot alike. One official suse page states, if you can't find a opensuse package, but can find a fedora package, to try it. It might work.

Some opensuse packages also have a fedora version.

Proof of my claim:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show ... ine:Fedora
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Rainmak3r »

Thanks for all the feedback!

I'm afraid messing with Wine is not an option: the setup I use for music is my regular laptop and not a dedicated music production environment, where I occasionally use Wine for gaming as well. I'm very much a Fedora user (just out of a long habit, no distro war reason), so KXStudio is not an option either :mrgreen:

I was just curious as to why it didn't work as expected on Fedora, but as I was saying, both fst.exe and dssi-wine do work fairly well in my case (I tried a few VST from Spitfire Labs and some other location successfully) so Carla is not a strict requirement, and I don't have a strong reason to build it manually now. Maybe in the future, if it turns out I'll need to!
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Rainmak3r wrote:Thanks for all the feedback!

I'm afraid messing with Wine is not an option: the setup I use for music is my regular laptop and not a dedicated music production environment, where I occasionally use Wine for gaming as well. I'm very much a Fedora user (just out of a long habit, no distro war reason), so KXStudio is not an option either :mrgreen:

I was just curious as to why it didn't work as expected on Fedora, but as I was saying, both fst.exe and dssi-wine do work fairly well in my case (I tried a few VST from Spitfire Labs and some other location successfully) so Carla is not a strict requirement, and I don't have a strong reason to build it manually now. Maybe in the future, if it turns out I'll need to!
What exactly do you mean by fst.exe? Is that a Windows executable to run VST's standalone (like Savihost)?

I see that you use DSSI (Dizzy). As far as I know that only works for 32 bit Windows VST's. If you want to use a 64 bit Windows VST you can use LinVST: it makes Windows VST's pop up like they were native Linux VST's (link). I don't know if LMMS supports Linux native VST's. That might be a workaround for you so you don't have to use Carla. See this topic about my experiences w/ Qtractor (= a sequencer/DAW) and VST plugins. If you ever want to record/produce music again with a VST you might have better luck w/ Qtractor than w/ LMMS on Fedora.

Good luck. :)
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Gps »

One reason , why I would like to use Carla, is that lmms does not support Linux vst.

Vestige is only for windows vst.

So no Amsynth for example in LMMS. :(

Gonna read that topic now. :)
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Rainmak3r »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:What exactly do you mean by fst.exe? Is that a Windows executable to run VST's standalone (like Savihost)?
It's a tool I found in the Fedora repos, this is the website:

https://www.joebutton.co.uk/fst/

I used it as a host for all the three VST's mentioned in this tutorial, and it worked nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBjpXPaLIh0

For some reason it didn't work with the free Spitfire Labs VST's, instead, for that I had to use dssi-wine.
I see that you use DSSI (Dizzy). As far as I know that only works for 32 bit Windows VST's. If you want to use a 64 bit Windows VST you can use LinVST: it makes Windows VST's pop up like they were native Linux VST's (link). I don't know if LMMS supports Linux native VST's. That might be a workaround for you so you don't have to use Carla. See this topic about my experiences w/ Qtractor (= a sequencer/DAW) and VST plugins. If you ever want to record/produce music again with a VST you might have better luck w/ Qtractor than w/ LMMS on Fedora.

Good luck. :)
Thanks for the tips, I'll look into those!
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

Rainmak3r wrote:
Linuxmusician01 wrote:What exactly do you mean by fst.exe? Is that a Windows executable to run VST's standalone (like Savihost)?
It's a tool I found in the Fedora repos, this is the website:

https://www.joebutton.co.uk/fst/

I used it as a host for all the three VST's mentioned in this tutorial, and it worked nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBjpXPaLIh0

For some reason it didn't work with the free Spitfire Labs VST's, instead, for that I had to use dssi-wine.
I see that you use DSSI (Dizzy). As far as I know that only works for 32 bit Windows VST's. If you want to use a 64 bit Windows VST you can use LinVST: it makes Windows VST's pop up like they were native Linux VST's (link). I don't know if LMMS supports Linux native VST's. That might be a workaround for you so you don't have to use Carla. See this topic about my experiences w/ Qtractor (= a sequencer/DAW) and VST plugins. If you ever want to record/produce music again with a VST you might have better luck w/ Qtractor than w/ LMMS on Fedora.

Good luck. :)
Thanks for the tips, I'll look into those!
Thank you for explaining fst.exe. In my distro (Mint 17.1) that's called festige. I got you mixed up with @gps who mentioned LMMS. What DAW do you use or do you want to use? You mention a Youtube video in which they import a VST pedal effect to use on a recorded (analogue audio?) guitar part. You have to use a DAW for that if I'm not mistaken. I don't think one can use fst.exe/festige on a recorded guitar part...

Anyway, you don't have to answer. Good luck in using Linux for music production. If you want to use Qtractor as a DAW open a topic on the problem on which you are stuck. :)
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by Rainmak3r »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:Thank you for explaining fst.exe. In my distro (Mint 17.1) that's called festige. I got you mixed up with @gps who mentioned LMMS. What DAW do you use or do you want to use? You mention a Youtube video in which they import a VST pedal effect to use on a recorded (analogue audio?) guitar part. You have to use a DAW for that if I'm not mistaken. I don't think one can use fst.exe/festige on a recorded guitar part...

Anyway, you don't have to answer. Good luck in using Linux for music production. If you want to use Qtractor as a DAW open a topic on the problem on which you are stuck. :)
I've been using Ardour so far, but I tested that demo without any DAW at all actually. I just connected my live guitar input (through a Scarlett Focusrite solo) to the VST's directly: more precisely, I chained them (guitar -> ts808 -> famp3 -> kefir) and connected the output to the speakers, and that worked. I assume in Ardour I could just use that output as the source for an audio track and record that. I agree this setup would probably be much more complex to use as a re-amping tool, which is what the guy in the video did instead. I haven't checked what Ardour supports in terms on VST at the moment.
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by jonetsu »

Rainmak3r wrote:Is this indeed a known limitation on Fedora, which would require a manual installation of Carla to fix? I think both fst.exe and dssi-wine do cover my (limited) needs for the moment, but being able to get it working with Carla would have been nice.
For the very basics of running Windows VSTs, wine + linvst does a simple but efficient good job.

And does not rely on any distro. Used the pair in Linux Mint 17.x and 18.x KDE, and now Xubuntu 18.04 LTS. Got 9.1GB of Windows plugins in good running condition, without having done any workaround researches and without having spent hours of trying to figure things.

Only sad part, is that the fix for running Melda plugins (114 of them) was removed from linvst if I'm not mistaken. So I hang to my git clone of linvst circa January this year where the patch was just put in by ubuntuuser after I mentioned the problem here.

But then on the other hand, you might need the advanced extra features of Carla, so this here was written merely to show an alternative that is distro-free, if the same user requirements applies.

Cheers.
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by jonetsu »

Rainmak3r wrote:I haven't checked what Ardour supports in terms on VST at the moment.
VST is a software interface. When well-implemented, there are no questions about supporting this and that, but rather about plugins that do not have their side of the interface so well-done.

For instance all Linux VST (u-he, OvertoneDSP, pianoteq, Biotek, Waverazor, etc) run fine.
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by ubuntuuser »

jonetsu wrote:
Rainmak3r wrote:Is this indeed a known limitation on Fedora, which would require a manual installation of Carla to fix? I think both fst.exe and dssi-wine do cover my (limited) needs for the moment, but being able to get it working with Carla would have been nice.
For the very basics of running Windows VSTs, wine + linvst does a simple but efficient good job.

And does not rely on any distro. Used the pair in Linux Mint 17.x and 18.x KDE, and now Xubuntu 18.04 LTS. Got 9.1GB of Windows plugins in good running condition, without having done any workaround researches and without having spent hours of trying to figure things.

Only sad part, is that the fix for running Melda plugins (114 of them) was removed from linvst if I'm not mistaken. So I hang to my git clone of linvst circa January this year where the patch was just put in by ubuntuuser after I mentioned the problem here.

But then on the other hand, you might need the advanced extra features of Carla, so this here was written merely to show an alternative that is distro-free, if the same user requirements applies.

Cheers.
I think Melda should be ok now (LinVst 2.65) as I managed to come up with a better workaround for what it's doing.

Also LinVst needs to be updated to LinVst 2.65 for kernel 5.2 and higher because of a bug, otherwise LinVst segfaults.
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Re: Carla + Fedora = no love?

Post by jonetsu »

ubuntuuser wrote: I think Melda should be ok now (LinVst 2.65) as I managed to come up with a better workaround for what it's doing.

Also LinVst needs to be updated to LinVst 2.65 for kernel 5.2 and higher because of a bug, otherwise LinVst segfaults.
Thanks. I might give it a try. I "might" because I tend to work in 'industrial mode' eg. if it works, don't change it, and it works fine at the moment.

Cheers.
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