Ardour 7 doesn't recognize new versions of some plugins

UPDATE: I think this question was poorly worded. Please see my reply to Robin Gareus before responding.

Today I fired up Ardour 7.0 for the first time - looks great! Thanks to the development team for all the hard work.

However, I’m encountering a minor problem with plugins (at least I hope it’s minor). I’m using Manjaro Linux - though I manually installed Ardour 7 from the Arch Linux repo, since Manjaro is still on 6.9.

I was going through some old tracks that I hadn’t listened to in a while, and I noticed certain plugins were not found, although they are definitely present on my system. I first noticed the problem with some Airwindows VST plugins, and then with the Odin2 Synthesizer LV2 plugin.

It is possible that the Airwindows plugins were non-functional due to being out of date (they have to be built from source, which I do manually), however Odin2 is fully up to date and should have worked. In fact, I can create a new MIDI track using Odin2 (LV2) in the same project, but somehow the old instances of the plugin are not found. I don’t want to simply delete the old instances and replace them with new ones, because presumably all the previous settings will be lost.

What can I do about this?

VST2/3 plugins need to be discovered first. For Airwindows check Ardour Menu > Window > Plugin Manager.

For VST2 plugins you may have to configure a location where you have installed the plugins and then scan them.

As for LV2, those are unconditionally scanned when Ardour starts. Try lv2ls (lists IDs installed LV2 plugins). perhaps lv2ls | grep -i odin.

Could it be that odin changed its unique identifier (URI)? Is the plugin found when you open the old session in Ardour 6.9?

Could it be that you have used the VST variant of Odin there? In which case scanning for VST plugins may help…

Thanks for your input. I think the wording of my question was a bit misleading. The problem I’m concerned about is not that some plugins are not found - it is that they are found, but they are not recognized as being the same as the ones that I used previously (though they should be).

Okay, good point. I did scan for VST plugins - and the supposedly missing ones were found. However, I didn’t close and reopen the project, which I maybe should have done, and I replaced the missing-plugin stubs with new instances. But it’s OK … I hadn’t recorded any sound in that project. I’ll see what happens when I open other projects that used Airwindows (or other VST) plugins.

In any case I’m more concerned about Odin2, since I have at least one complex project that heavily depends on it.

Yes, and Odin 2 was definitely installed before I opened the project that used it, and Ardour found both LV2 and VST versions of it. And I was able to create a new track using the Odin2 LV2 plugin. But the instances of Odin2 in preexisting tracks were still identified as not found.

I suppose it could be. How would I find out if that’s the case?

IDK. I replaced 6.9 with 7.0. I might have been a little more cautious if I were dependent on Ardour for important work, but it’s more of an experiment for me at this point.

No, it could not. But in any case, I’d already scanned for VSTs before opening the project in question.

Check what unique Id is used, in your old session. To do so grep for lv2:

grep 'type="lv2"'  /path/to/YourSession/YourSession.ardour`

The output should include some line(s) like

<Processor id="69352" name="Odin2" active="1" user-latency="0" use-user-latency="0" type="lv2" unique-id="https://thewavewarden.com/odin2" count="1" custom="0">

So here, with recent Odin 2.3.4 the identifier is https://thewavewarden.com/odin2.

PS For future reference: major versions of Ardour can be installed in parallel.You can have both Ardour 6 and Ardour7.

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