Plugin presets not available on new machine

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

I’m attempting to migrate my projects to a new computer and am not able to load my saved user-created plugin presets in Ardour.
I’ve copied across ~/.lv2 and ~/.config/Ardour8.
I created a couple of dummy presets on the new machine and then searched for them in my file browser which did confirm that ~/.lv2 contains files for them but presets copied across to this location from my old machine are not available in their respective plugin GUIs in Ardour. Permissions look OK as far as I can tell.

Am I missing something?

The old machine was running Debian 12 and the new one Fedora 41 and the plugins have been installed from different sources if that makes any difference.

Many thanks

#2

Yeah it likely does. Fedora does not heed the official LV2 standard.

Assuming the presets you want to migrate are actually for LV2 plugins (and not VST), try to locate them on the old machine by file name.

#3

Yes, they are mostly LV2 plugins and I’ve done exactly this.

How annoying. Do you know what it does differently?
I would happily use Debian on it now but Fedora was the only distro that I could get to run properly, perhaps because the hardware is so new…

#4

Fedora adds arch prefixes. So instead of /usr/lib/lv2 (as per LV2’s Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). Plugins are placed in /lib64/lv2 or /usr/lib64/lv2.

–

As for investigating the issue install lilv-utils which provides lv2ls and lv2info command-line tools.

Run lv2ls to print URID of all installed plugins, and then pick one where the presets are not copied, then query it with lv2info (which lists presets and locations). this may provide some hints.

#5

The OP mentioned user-saved presets, wouldn’t those all have to be stored in ~/.lv2? It seems like whether the system binaries are in /usr/lib/lv2 or /usr/lib64/lv2 would not affect the files stored in ~/.lv2.

#6

I wondered about that as well. liblilv searches for presets in all LV2Path locations, and saves them in the first writable one in the (here, implicit) LV2Path location, which may or may not be $HOME/.lv2/

Yet that is apparently not the case on the OPs system’s liblilv install.

#7

That is not what I observe on my system. My LV2_PATH is:

$ echo $LV2_PATH
/home/chris/lib/lv2:/home/chris/.lv2:/usr/lib/lv2

because I like to keep my per-user-installed plugin bundles separate from the LV2 preset bundles. I make sure that Ardour is started via a script, which sets LV2_PATH:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -d "$HOME/lib/lv2" ]]; then
    if ! echo $LV2_PATH | grep -q $HOME/lib/lv2; then
        LV2_PATH="$HOME/lib/lv2:$HOME/.lv2:/usr/lib/lv2"
    fi
fi

export LV2_PATH
exec ardour8 "$@"

With this, Ardour still saves presets in ~/.lv2, even if this dir is the second entry in LV2_PATH.

#8

Try and create a preset using the same plugin and with the same preset name as one of your old ones
Check for differences in the folder name, file names and the names inside of the ttl files.

LV2 presets aren’t that complicated from a file structure POV so any given distro shouldn’t be able to screw it up that badly, I would think.