I updated Ardour from 8.12.0 to 9.2. When I try to insert a Calf Equalizer, Ardour crashes and displays the following message in the terminal:
CALF DEBUG: instance 0x5e51a9b48500 data 0x5e51a9aeb3c0
CALF DEBUG: calf 0x7ca1d8d96350 cpi 0x7ca1d8735900
(ardour-9.2.0:81664): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 15:13:22.494: specified class size for type 'CalfKnob' is smaller than the parent type's 'GtkRange' class size
(process:81664): GLib-CRITICAL (recursed) **: Failed to get RW lock 0x7ca337987c20: Resource deadlock avoided
Aborted (core dumped)
It seems there’s a problem with GTK. Any ideas on what to do about it? I tried reinstalling/recompiling Calf, but it didn’t help. For now, we’ll stick with version 8 until it works.
Calf plugins (or rather their GUIs) are no longer supported. They are also about to be removed from various GNU/Linux distros (some have already dropped them).
Good to know, thanks! Then we’ll avoid using them in future projects and start new ones with alternatives. LSP comes to mind right away. Maybe you have any other recommendations? I found the Calf plugins pretty useful.
Also x42 (Robin is the developer behind the x42 plugins haha). From what I can tell, LSP and x42 are effectively canonical plugin sets at this point (there are others like SWH as well). Not canonical as in blessed by Ardour, mind you, but rather canonical as in many people use them
Hi,
I changed the stop/play key to F12 but then I wanted to go back to the usual Space and when I wanted to change it again Ardour broke immediately.
There was something else with the other key change I don’t remember but the point is that when I press some keys according to myself the program disappears for some reason
You should create a separate topic for that comment.
That said it could be that your window manager uses those same keys for its own purposes and that Ardour doesn’t filter the input correctly (I have no idea if Ardour really is able to “hijack” window manager key bindings).
If you can’t get it to work you can always try to rename or manually edit ~/.config/ardour9/ardour-9.2.keys (I guess “9.2” depends on the actual version of Ardour9 you’re running).
I pretty much rely on the mentioned lsp-plugins and the x42-plugins.
tal-plugins ?, but i didn’t really look at them (yet)
i also downloaded ToneBoosters, the gui is fancy, but for me they are quite “shaky” (but i have really very low-specs software, ymmv).
doing "dpkg - l | grep " i find die-plugins. I wasn’t even aware they were installed.
Just to mention those three, as said, i can’t really say a lot about them.
Hello, today there are many plug-ins available for Linux, some free, others not, in the first 2 links, you can search and you will surely find something that interests you.
The other 4 links are direct to plugin pages that I usually use to a greater or lesser extent.
That’s really bad, because calf Plugins are still the best around, and many users know how to handle them for best results.
I use Ardour 8.12 and found a solution to use an gtk bridge.
I won’t update Ardour untill it is clear that this Bridge will still work.
Objectively they’re one of the worse sets out there. Their GUIs display doesn’t match what the DSP does, all their multiband plugins produce audible phasing artifacts. The EQ introduces zipper noise… all of this is easily measured too.
Most of their plugins are great to distort things though. If that is what you want to sculpt sounds, then yes. Use your ears and knowledge… though there are better distortions out there
In my experience on Debian anyway that bandaid GTK bridge is broken in Debian Trixie and it was always a ‘borrowed time’ bridge anyway. The Plugins are not good DSP, the UI’s now only work with a bridge that is broken and the UI toolkit they are based on is being removed from all modern mainstream Distros… Take a hint, it’s time to move on!
For sure no. Plenty of alternatives. Do yourself a favor, forget them and serch for
LSP,X42, ZL Audio, MDA, Socalab, Dimethoxy Audio, SuperflyDSP (freware), gxplugins, Venn audio (freware), Airwindows and Disthro. just to name a few collections (open source or freeware). Search well on linuxdaw.org.
Calf does provide some really nice reverb, saturation, and exciter (to my amateur ears). Regardless, per the advice of the maintainers of Ardour, I am beginning to look for alternatives.
There are two cleaner options to solve this:
Somewhat clean: Ardour does stuff to improve compatibility (which it won’t because it’s a hassle, waste of time, and CALF isn’t what it’s cracked up to be).
Clean (because CALF does its job): CALF ports itself to gtk3, which there are talks on the repo, talks of a ctk, which will take a lot of time, then applying ctk which will take even more time. Knowing GIMP’s fiasco with their port, this will take a long long long time. There are discussions of using AI to do this - due to copyright and quality issues (license cannot be applied to AI generated sections), I did advise them against that.
Porting to GTK3 will not help. It is not possible to have two different major versions of GTK (or Qt) in the same running process.
Plugins need their GUIs written with something other than toolkits intended to write desktop applications.
Also, Ardour doing anything to “help” doesn’t address the fact the Linux distros will or have already ceased distributing CALF because they have removed GTK2.
I don’t think there are any serious plans to port Calf to a different UI toolkit. The developer that was working on CTK stated over a year ago that he was several man-months away from completion, and he no longer had any time to devote to it, so development halted on that front. The only talk of GTK3 on the GitHub tracker I’ve seen was asking if it would happen, followed by reasons why it wouldn’t, which aligned with what @paul noted.
If there are some Calf plugins you can’t live without and don’t want to use their generic controls, you could make your own GUIs using XUiDesigner by @brummer
I tried this out for Calf’s Vintage Delay a while back and got it working in Ardour on my first attempt just using the defaults. It could be made to look a lot nicer if you source some fancier looking knobs, sliders, background design, etc. It was a proof-of-concept, fun activity for me, not something I intended to fully develop or share, but in someone else’s hands, XUiDesigner seemed capable to me of producing very good looking LV2 plugin GUIs.
The best overall advice remains to move on from Calf and use other options, but if there are a couple of their plugins for which you don’t find alternatives, XUiDesigner is pretty fun and easy to tinker with and could be an option for creating your own GUI that will work in Ardour.
(Robin is the developer behind the x42 plugins haha). From what I can tell, LSP and x42 are effectively canonical plugin sets at this point (there are others like SWH as well). Not canonical as in blessed by Ardour, mind you, but rather canonical as in many people use them 
