Hi everyone,
I’m trying to use Carla Patchbay to load some .sfz files but it won’t produce any sound when I put it on a MIDI track, no matter what plugin I load into it. Carla works fine by itself but it doesn’t produce sound when in Ardour. I only hear sound from Carla Patchbay when I put it directly on the master bus. I am using Ardour 8.12.0 on Linux Mint 22.1. How can I fix this?
Any help is appreciated.
Hi,
Carla Patchbay? You would want to be using Carla Rack and loading the SFZ into one of the Rack slots
That said Carla Rack is fine for this but you may be better off with a dedicated SFZ Plugin like Sfizz although I don’t see their website or Linux binaries/packages anymore…?
Here is the last downloaded Debian package of SFizz shipped in AV Linux and it should also work fine in Linux Mint if you want to try it: SFizz Deb
It’s working here for me with Ardour-8.12:
Hi, thank you for your reply!
I appreciate your suggestion but I’d still like to try using Carla for this. I have now tried using Carla Rack but I still hear no sound. I am not sure what I’m doing wrong. Do you have any idea why this is happening?
Sorry, I don’t have Carla installed, hopefully a Carla User will stop by soon. If not after work I can try and look into it if you don’t have an answer by then.
That’s totally fine, thank you for your help.
Post a screenshot of the channel strip that shows the plugins in it. My first thought is you installed it on a track but don’t have audio or MIDI routed to/from it.
Seablade
Yes, that is what Seablade meant.
I don’t use MIDI tracks often, but audio tracks usually have the green connections between processors in the track. It appears you may have routed MIDI into CarlaRack, and MIDI out of Carla Rack, with no audio connections out of Carla Rack, but I am not positive.
Ding ding ding!
Yep that does appear to be exactly what happened. So the audio has nowhere to go in this case. It appears your track has no outputs really, so click on the horizontal line button brave the button that says Comments and try to route the output of the track to your master (Or an audio bus). You may have to create audio outputs in order to do this.
Seablade
I am probably missing something but I can’t see the Busses tab on the right in the routing grid, so I don’t know how to route the track to master.
I had a look… I installed Carla and loaded Carla Rack on a track and loaded some Plugins into the rack and also had no Audio i/o. With all due respect Carla is primarily a bridging tool to host unsupported Plugin formats in a DAW (ie host an LV2 in a host DAW that only supports VST). I personally find it to be far too complicated to simply host an SFZ file and requires you to add the specific SFZ path and rescan every time, which is why it’s not installed on my machine. Like I said it will do it but it’s very clumsy for this. In the example I showed above with SFizz I simply loaded the Plugin, found the SFZ in the file dialog and all MIDI and Audio routing was all set to go. I have no idea whay Carla isn’t simply providing Audio outs, most instrument Plugins just do this.
Don’t take my word for it and if you don’t trust the SFizz package I posted then your caution is commendable but I can promise you my intentions are only to help. If you read elsewhere and look at some other DAWs and workflows I will guarantee you that you will find using a dedicated SFZ Plugin is FAR better than using Carla just for this…
I’ll leave it there, best of luck!
I appreciate you trying it out. I understand that Carla may not be the ideal solution unfortunately and it’s true I am still a bit skeptical about the package you provided. Still, I wanted to thank you and everyone else who tried to help, it truly means a lot.
The homepage is here:
Home - SFZTools
Downloads are here:
Install package home:sfztools:sfizz / sfizz
Weird, I went from the link on their github page which tried to take me to a porn site until Firefox intervened with a warning (thankfully) the Sfizz devs really need to fix that… If they changed web hosts or whatever that old link has to go!
Hey everyone,
I did manage to fix the issue with Carla. The entire time I was using the LV2 version of the plugin but I have now tried the VST version and the sound now works. I have no idea why I had problems with the audio i/o when using the LV2 version though.
I remain curious what you feel you gain by loading plugins into Carla inside Ardour, rather than using them directly.
I don’t really feel like I gain anything from it, I was struggling to find a plugin I could use to load .sfz files and I was a bit skeptical of Sfizz from the beginning and especially after what Glen said. I’ve also tried liquidsfz but for some reason Ardour wouldn’t load it and I opted for Carla because I have already used it in the past and am somewhat familiar with it.
To be clear, there is absolutely nothing with SFizz or their project, it’s probably the best SFZ Plugin we have at least until the Linux port of Sforzando is complete. I searched for their site after the original post and found their github page and the link on that github page to their actual webpage was expired or out of date and had been commandeered by someone else. There is nothing sketchy about the code or Plugin itself and others have kindly shared their updated webpage and download links where you can safely get SFizz.
What better ingredients for a night in than sfz files and porn!