“but for the price I’d say the LADSPA/LV2 are infinitely good.”
Well I can’t argue with that, that’s provably mathematically correct
Thanks for the tip on the triple parametric, I’ll try that. The rest of the SWH plugins run fine, it’s just the Multiband EQ (so far) that I have trouble with. My system’s very stable in every other respect - I do a lot of video and audio work on it - and it’s not as if it’s a random occurrence, it’s completely repeatable every time. Might just be some library problem in my distro I guess. Whatever, I can live without the ones that crash.
Oh, also, thanks for the pointer to jconv. I wasn’t aware of that, looks like it might be just what I’m looking for (oh how I miss you, TC Native Reverb… )
I’m a little confused, you are using my AV Linux Ardour package and having all of these ridiculous permissions issues with Ubuntu, is AV Linux not working for you? I’d be glad to help if I can. It includes every LADSPA plugin available and a few that aren’t readily available, LV2 Plugins, VST support via both FST and DSSI-VST, plus a host of great linuxDSP Plugins ready to insert. No silly permissions and the VST_PATH pre-configured. If there is an issue please let me know, I can’t fathom how Ubuntu could be so much trouble?
to peder: I just didn’t get that far, to complain about reverb and delay, but you’re right: They are also not good. I have to support DrG’s argument, that the eq’s are simply to undefined and rough. No Q-factor and so on. The compressors are pretty hard to configure and then they sound, lets say acceptable. The only one that comes next to vst is C4. LADSPA is a nice tool for homestudios, but I try to take Ardour and Linux further on to professional usage. But for this I need perfect vst support. I also trigger the drums via a VST-Tool that translates audio-signal into a midi signal so that I can use every drum-computer to trigger the signal. But I guess that’s also not possible in Ardour. Some of the VST components are pretty expensive, so they should work. I don’t use that much hardware effects, so it’s really important to me, that VST works. And as long as Ardour doesn’t get to that point, I can’t move from fucking windows to a Linux distribution, no matter if Ubunt, AV-Linux, Debian, Open Suse or whatever.
Thanks for all your responses.
the eq's are simply to undefined and rough. No Q-factor and so on
Say what?
OK, so there isn't a knob called Q, but there is a slider called bandwidth which, as every reasonably experienced engineer should recognize, is what Q really is. Try Steve Harris' Triple Parametric or Fons Adriaensen's 4-band parametric and see for yourself. Obviously the graphic EQs don't have a Q/bandwidth setting.
I don’t know if there’s any audio2midi program for linux. For drums it doesn’t sound that complicated but I haven’t had the need for it so I haven’t looked. Perhaps somebody else can chip in.
ATM Ardour doesn’t handle MIDI (it’s in the upcoming 3.0 release) so you’d have to use Rosegarden or another sequencing program for that and sync it to Aurdour.
As I said before, if you’re looking for perfect VST functionality for all your expensive plugins you really should stay in the Windows world. Even if it’s gradually getting better I doubt Linux/Wine will ever run all Windows programs flawlessly (then again say one Linux binary that can be run unmodified on Windows…).
You really should use the tool that suits your needs best.
I have no problem about your complaining about VST imperfections, difficulties for a newbie to set things up perfectly and the quality about certain effects but when you start whining about things you obviously haven’t taken two seconds to think about (the Q thing) I get really annoyed.
And FWIW Linux and Ardour are used in professional studios. Maybe not at the ones Metallica, Celine Dion or Garth Brooks choose to record at but OTOH I doubt they’re your clientele either.
And though you haven’t given any specifics about which reverb/delays you’ve tried and why they are no good (first rule of complaining: be specific), you should try Fons’ jconv Impulse Response effect.
It’s a bit cumbersome to set up ATM (I think he’s working on a GUI version) but once you have it up and running you can use response files from any real effects processor or room and lots of them are free.
“Some of the VST components are pretty expensive, so they should work”
No, that’s not right. They’re expensive yes, so they should work, yes - but only on Windows. To claim that they should work on Linux is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding. Windows is an operating system, Linux is a different operating system. Taking software written for one operating system and running it on another is something that doesn’t usually work. VST plugin-ins are written for Windows and the fact they run under Linux at all is purely down to the skill and hard work of the people at the WiNE project, who do it for free. Nobody at Waves expects their plugins to run under Linux, nobody at Waves will give support if you use their plugins under Linux. As I say, the fact it works at all is down to the efforts of a few guys who do it for free. You cannot now, and probably never, expect Windows software to run perfectly under Linux. If VST plugins are your number one priority then you will have to stick with Windows. Or a Mac, maybe?
If you need your favourite plugins to work under Linux then you should be contacting the companies who write the plugins and asking for native Linux versions. I doubt you’ll get much in the way of response, but the more people who ask, the more likely it will happen. It is not the responsibility of the Ardour developers to make VST plugins work - the support is there because, well, because it can be done but the complexities of running mixed operating systems mean it is unlikely ever to work as well as you need it to. I think perhaps you have not understood this.
To DrG: Misunderstanding: I didn’t mean they should work on linux because they are expensive, I meant that they have to work so I can work with ardour. I know that they don’t work perfectly now.
To Peder: I didn’t want to start arguing about the quality of LADSPA effects. Some of them are quite good (I had one chorus and the c4 was acceptable). But for a stereo delay that get’s sync with the tempo of the song, I should have some more parametres how I want them synced or in which way it should get balanced. Some of the reverbs aren’t bad, too. But I don’t want a “not bad” effect or a “acceptable” effect in a studio, people pay for. It’s my task to use the best, available effect to reach the best quality of sound for my clients. And LADSPA didn’t get that far, yet. It’s like the first VST’s. Not bad, but not comparable with real hardware effects. That’s what VST builders reached now. I only want to use them. And that’s the only point where Ardour should try to get fit. If VST ever works on ardour so I can work with my plug ins, I will move from windows to a less dangerous system, so I can make live recordings without getting sick of windows-errors and bluescreens. Don’t get me wrong! For homerecording and projectstudios LADSPA is a really good alternative, but no plug in reaches trueverb or rverb from waves, or the L2 limiter and comparable. There’s a reason why one of those plug ins costs 250 bugs!
The beauty with opensource is that, in theory, you could take the delay you like the most and add the missing pieces. I understand you might not have those skills (I for sure don’t) but instead of paying for the VST you could pay someone to do the coding for you. Or simply ask the developer to add those features, he might very well do it for free (and even thank you for the suggestion in the Changelog!).
Just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding here: there’s nothing inherently “better” with VST compared to LADSPA or LV2, it’s just the skill and know-how of the guy or gal doing the algorithms. And most likely a company with 10-20-100 employees and a R&D budget of a couple of millions is going to a better job than a single guy in his basement with a cup of coffee or two. That said I think some LADSPA/LV2 plugins could rival at least some VST’s.
And if you got the source to your favorite VST plugin and wrote a LADSPA/LV2 interface around it it would sound exactly as good.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are (maybe even free) Impulse Responses for Trueverb or Rverb (there sure are for TC, Lexicon, Yamaha and others) you could use with jconv.
With the brickwall limited, crunched sound that everybody seems to strive for today, that’s either played to drunks at a bar, through earplugs of varying quality or the PC speaker that came with the computer, I really doubt anyone can hear the difference between your $250 VST plugin and my $0 LADSPA one. I’m quite sure that if you showed your clients a really expensive Windows setup and then secretly mixed their record with Ardour they wouldn’t notice anything special. But of course I understand the (not always exactly correct) impression of perception and market hype.
I also bet I could do a better job mixing Death Magnetic with (no cost) Ardour/LADSPA/LV2 than they managed to (not) do in their multi-million dollar Neve/Soundcraft/VST/whatnot-expensive studio.
So, to conclude, please check in on the Linux scene every once in a while, but expect no magic VST solution other than trial-and-error anytime soon.
On a side note to sound and pricetag I saw an interesting experiment on swedish TV a couple of months ago; a group of ten experienced swedish singers, musicians and music journalists were asked to listen to skilled performers playing a cheap Gibson copy and a real one from the 60’s, a Steinway Concerto piano and an iPhone (yes the sampled sound that apparently the iPhone has) and a beginners violin and a Stradovarius.
Of those ten only three were able to pick out all of the expensive one and the piano thing was more or less a given since the iPhone version was played on the iPhone so the performance was far from as good as the Steinway one; I don’t think anyone missed on that.
Also, these were solo performances. I imagine the difficulty would have been even greater if it had been in a band/orchestral environment.
OK I think we’re all on the same wavelength now I still think that if you are waiting for VSTs to work perfectly on Linux you will have a very, very long wait. I don’t know how much you understand about the complexities involved. I understand a fair bit about it and I am completely amazed that it works at all. But given the rate of change in the Linux world, and the completely closed nature of VST source code I cannot envisage a day when you will be able to take a VST plug-in at random and expect it to work on Linux. It’s asking a great deal. And it’s not really anything to do with Ardour - Ardour builds in an interface that can be used to run VSTs. The actual work of running them is down to other projects - mainly WiNE.
All that said, I completely understand where you’re coming from. I’ve had some success in using Native Instruments VSTis under Linux (with much lower latency than I ever got under windows). Someone else on here has got the Waves plugins running. But it takes effort, understanding, and patience. And frequently, a lot of swearing
I think peder’s suggestion is a great one - if pros can engage the LADSPA community more, give them ideas and incentives and tell them what real studio people actually want then they will get exactly what they want. And that will be better than any off-the-shelf VST plug-in.
“There’s a reason why one of those plug ins costs 250 bugs!”
Yes there is. It’s called “300% mark-up” or “a rip-off”
One interesting experiment would be to have a skilled engineer mix a pop/rock song using a $250 reverb and then try to make a similar mix using one of the best LADSPA/LV2 reverbs.
Then you’d have ten other engineers listening to the tracks and answering these questions in order:
Which reverb would you pay $250 for?
Would you pay for that even if you could have the other one for free?
Would you consider using the free one regardless?
Now, the twist would be that only six would listen to the free vs. nonfree. Two would hear the $250 and another one in the same price range and two would hear two good free ones. Or you could split it 4-3-3.
Then maybe do the same test with ten “people from the street” and slightly modified questions.
I don’t doubt that some commercial plugins are far better than the free ones but the question is more; are the free ones that bad and can people really hear the difference in the context of a song.
I made a demo mix once where I had to stretch a short solo bassnote that would fade out while only the singer stayed on top. Since I’d forgotten about the rubberband function (only came to think of it right now actually) I cut out a small portion of it, copied the fragments next to each other and added a global fade.
When soloed you could clearly hear the “sawtooth” amplitue where the piece restarted after each short fade. But with the singer on top of it and with her slight vibrato there was no way to tell that there was nothing but a natural fade to the tone.
It’s worth remembering too that there are millions of outboard devices out there are perfectly Linux compatible, assuming you have a few spare analog or digital IO ports.
The lower end Lexicons are great reverbs, and still have the edge on most VST plugins. They also don’t slowly lose compatibility with current OS/DAWs when a company stops supporting them, or closes their online authorisation servers.
You can get 90% of the way there with jconv though. The only thing it can’t do is the heavily modulated patches.
OK. You convinced me ;-). Has anybody tried to transform the free Glaceverb VST to LADSPA? And still there is a problem: I need a working possibility to trigger my drums. I usually did this with the KT-Drum Trigger (freeware). If it would be possible to create a plug in using jack as midi-connector to write a midi-signal in any midi-aplication on linux, this would be great. For the higher end productions I need a possibility, to trigger drums (sometimes the bassdrum with a lower sinus tone). Then we could talk about getting further. And a paragraphic equalizer in every track would also be great, just like in protools and cubase.
What I additionally wanted to say: I want to support the ardour community financially. But I wanted to get sure first that I have no loss of quality in my productions. But if it’s really possible, that effects and aplications get changed for personal needs, then I think I will try it, and make the next production with ardour.
First, the Glaceverb homepage (http://www.dasample.com/ AFAIKT) seems down and second it seems only free as in beer and not in speach, meaning there seems to be no source code to start porting from.
As for paragraphic equalizer the only thing looking like this http://www.waves.com/objects/Images/Screenshots\sshot_big_q10_01.jpg in the linux world would be Jamin’s EQ but inserting that on each track would require a really fast CPU. But do you really need more than three or four sweepable EQ’s (Triple parametric/4-band parametric) on each track?
No, never. But a graphical view of things is always really helpful. Paragraphic only means a mixture of graphic and parametric eq. The number of bands is optional. 4 bands are enough. But for sweeping through frequencies a graphical drag and drop interface is really helpful and saves a lot of time during a album production.
I don’t think it would take you that long to get used to a non graphic display for sweeping. After all you primarily listen for the right freq, right?
And the LV2 version of the 4 band (FIL) has graphics as well: http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/lv2fil/ , even if you can’t drag the curves. Edit: To use this you might need to patch Ardour with http://nedko.arnaudov.name/soft/ardour2-r5126-lv2_external_ui.patch or use lv2rack from zynjacku (can’t give an URL because the spam filter won’t let me) to load it externally.
Yes I found the KVR page but the “Free download” link points to the dead dasample page.
And I’m pretty sure the download only contains a dll anyway.
Regards triggering your drums, if MIDI works for you there is a program called a2jmidid that can be used to route JACK MIDI to ALSA midi. It runs as a JACK application - you can use it to route JACK MIDI in to a MIDI Thru port and you can then route that MIDI Thru into the MIDI in of any ALSA-aware application (which is most of them). I use this with VST instruments for real-time performance, all the patching can be done through QJackCtrl.
