CALF Plugins in Ubuntu 24.04 won't load in Ardour 8.12

[David_Monniaux]

Hi

Under Ubuntu 24.04, CALF plugins show up in the plugin list, but won’t load. The message is:

LV2: Failed to instantiate plugin http://calf.sourceforge.net/plugins/Reverb

Any idea?

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Ardour 8.4 Calf plugins [ERROR]: failed to instantiate LV2 GUI

Note that Calf will likely soon vanish from many GNU/Linux distributions as well. – A bit of background: Various GNU/Linux distros are dropping GTK2. This means that all software that still depends on it can no longer be packaged. Notably Debian is finally doing this, which affects all debian based distributions (Ubuntu, UbuntuStudio, AVLinux, KXstudio, …) Ardour was affected by this, which is which is Ardour 8.4 internalized the toolkit. This in turn breaks plugins that still rely on GTK2+…

Short version, not working as intended.

  Seablade

[ardourwlk (M Aaronwalker)]

Do a search on the forum for “calf”, and you’ll see all the postings related to this. Basically, CALF is outdated.