Calf lv2 on ardour5 32bit

Installation & Configuration Mac OS X
#1

Hey, I was pretty excited to see that ardour5 is bundled with quite a few LV2 plugins, so I installed calf with homebrew.
These plugins do work in the 64bit version of ardour, however they don’t work in the 32-bit version, despite compiling every dependency all over by issuing “brew install calf --universal”.

I’m using ardour as a secondary daw because I need to preserve compatibility with some 32-bit Audio unit plugins, so if I were to use the 64 bit version of ardour I would unfortunately be in the very same position. Anyone here, slightly more tech savy that has any idea how to make this work?

#2

If you use 64-bit Ardour, you could always try a 32-bit to 64-bit bridge like 32 Lives: http://www.soundradix.com/products/32-lives/.

If you’re using JACK to run Ardour, you might also even be able to “patch in” your 32-bit plugins, but that would be a pain.

#3

As a side note, how were you able to get Calf plugins on OSX?

#4

I suppose 32 lives is a suitable solution as well, despite the hefty 99usd pricetag.

It’s fairly easy to install calf with homebrew:
brew tap david0/homebrew-audio
brew install calf

This installs calf with the generic ui, however, if you want to use the gtk gui with ardour, you need to build ardour against homebrew gtk. The same repository has an ardour5 formula if you’re interested. Personally I haven’t tried it out for myself as of this moment.

#5

I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend against using Homebrew to build Ardour on OS X. Unless things have changed dramatically, you will end up needing to do a complete system install before you’re done.

#6

Thank you for that warning, but I’m rather curious, seeing that homebrew installs everything inside /usr/local/ , simply removing homebrew ought to remove any conflicting dependancies(e.g the renowned gtk font error) from your path ought to be enough to restore a vanilla system?
Just to be clear, I’m not actually using ardour from the homebrew repository, I bought my copy here. What I wanted was to test the LV2 plugins in david0’s repository, as of this moment I managed to get calf, caps, mverb, x42plugins working with the official version of ardour in 64bit.

#7

If you take a look at the libs required to build Ardour (nighty.ardour.org has dynamically generated lists), you will see that is (a) a long list (b) overlaps somewhat with libraries provided by OS X.

The problem is that the system versions of some of these libraries are not usable with Ardour. Once you start using homebrew (or ports) to replace them, things start to get complicated.