Hello, I’ve been using Ardour on Windows 10 (64bits) for the last 6 months or so, and I really like it, but i have an issue i can’t resolve yet.
I have some Waves plugins that work fine in Ardour, but the Waves Tune one won’t sync with Ardour transport (In order to edit the sound inside the VST and send transport signals to Ardour so i can move through the track and not have to close the plugin every time i want it to play from determinated point in time).
Waves Tune uses propellerhead’s ReWire to sync with DAWs, but since Ardour doesn’t have ReWire support i want to know if there’s any way to do it via JACK or maybe if there’s such a thing as a ReWire emulator.
Basically, i need to control the transport from a VST, i am assuming that if i can do it with Waves Tune i would be also able to do it with other edition plugins.
I have spent some time reading the forum and looking for tutorials to get this done, but still don’t know how to do it (Also, i’ve already configured JACK on my computer but can’t find any option that lets me do what i need).
Thank you very much for reading this, and hopefully someone can help me out.
Plugins do not use Rewire to sync with the host. If you’re using the Waves Tune VST, then there is a method defined by the VST specification to allow the plugin to sync with the host. Ardour supports this mechanism, and other plugins are known work fine with this mechanism.
I would suggest you check out a version of the 6.1-rc1 pre-release from nightly.ardour.org and see if it still has this issue.
Thank you very much for your quick reply. This plugin actually do use ReWire to connect to the hosts (or at least that is what the manufacturer says).
When I open Waves Tune in Ardour it gives me an error saying the plugin couldn’t connect to ReWire and that I need to check my settings.
It happens that Waves includes a “ReWire plugin” that gives ReWire support with Waves Tune but it seems to be compatible with Pro Tools only. (In this link there is a reference to that error: https://www.waves.com/support/rewire-link-cannot-be-established-in-waves-tune
but the solutions given by the company don’t work on Ardour). I’ve literally pasted the ReWire64x.dll file in my plugins folder but it doesn’t show on Ardour.
So i think i will need another way to sync Ardour’s transport to be manipulated inside the Waves Tune plugin.
I’ll check out the pre-release but i don’t know how to configure it to make the error message disapear and have control of the playback inside the plugin. Could you or anyone elaborate on that?
I did go and read about Waves Tune, and remarkably, it really does seem to require Rewire. Completely crazy.
I don’t think you will able to use Tune, since Ardour has no support for Rewire (and almost certainly never will, not least because Propellerheads still do not allow for an open source implementation of Rewire support).
That is very sad, because i really like Ardour and i want to use my plugins normally.
I know of a “Rewire VST” plugin that is sold for $29 USD but i am afraid i won’t work in Ardour, and the link for the demo is broken, and I don’t know if it works in a way that Waves Tune would detect and synchronize to.
The VST is offered here: https://energy-xt.com/rewire-vst.html
Also is there a possible way to emulate ReWire inside a DAW? Well maybe I’m asking for an impossible thing, but I’m very interested in keep using Ardour with my old plugins.
Thank you very much for your time and help. Hopefully there could still be a way to synchronize this plugin to Ardour, but i supose it may require a lot more research.
Reading between the lines, I am guessing that the problem is this: to do what Tune does (similar to Melodyne), the plugin needs to be able to access the audio from the any part of the timeline, at any time. This is not part of any conventional plugin API, which is why Melodyne invented their “ARA” API so that hosts could support it, and Melodyne could request data from anywhere in a track. If you can’t do this, you can’t do what these plugins do.
I suspect that Rewire has a similar API available, and Waves chose to use that instead of Melodyne ARA.
FYI: Melodyne finally agreed to allow open source implementations of ARA last year, so it is possible that we might do that at some point.
That’s great news for melodyne users. What about that ReWire VST? Is it possible that it works on Ardour? I’ve already sent an email to the developers but yet havn’t received a response.
Is this API thing (I don’t know how that works) meaning that is absolutely impossible to make Waves Tune work with all its functionality on Ardour?
(Actually the VST works but it depends on the transport from Ardour directly and it’s very uncomfortable to work having to close and open the Waves Tune plugin constantly).
If Tunes wants to control the transport mechanism, then (1) I can see why Waves chose to Rewire, since that’s one of the features of Rewire (similar to JACK in many senses) (2) there’s no way for a plugin to do this inside Ardour (although it could theoretically be it’s own JACK client; that would only work if Ardour was also using JACK, which is not required in order to use Ardour).
Hope that makes some sense, even though it is bad news.
I do use JACK with Ardour, how can i turn a VST into a client? Is that what theoretically could work? I am willing to try anything that could make me return to my normal workflow with Waves Tune.
So, one last question, if that “ReWire VST” by Energy-XT adds “ReWire master functionallity” as it claims in the website, is it possible that it works like a sort of Rewire emulator for Ardour?
In Pro Tools, users add an aux track from wich they run the Waves ReWire plugin and it adds ReWire support to that DAW so it can sync with Waves Tune. Is it possible that the ReWire VST from Energy-XT works the same way in Ardour or is it simply impossible that Rewire VST plugin works on this software to that sort of synchronization?
No, that plugin would allow a host (e.g. Energy-XT or Ardour or whatever) to communicate with Rewire. But you need a host that is itself “running” Rewire or “supporting” Rewire. Ardour doesn’t do this (and cannot do this as long as Propellerheads prevent an open source implementation of Rewire support; even then, it is not likely that we would add it).
Ok, thank you very much for your time, I understand better the problem now.
So the only hope i could have is that Waves modifies the plugin to allow other protocols and that’s not likely to happen either. Very sad news for me, but I also found that Waves Tune can take MIDI input for the note edition so in that case maybe i can edit the audio in the Ardour sequencer directly. I hope at least this way works so I can continue using this plugin on Ardour.
Ardour is a really powerfull piece of software and I plan to keep using it, even if I have to modify somehow my workflow, since most professional propietary DAWs keep using really awful bussiness models (with a few exceptions, but I still like Ardour more).
