I’m pretty new to linux and DAWs in general so not very knowledgeable in neither but I’ve been trying to find what’s the issue causing the Zyn plugin to open a blank window and then crash after a few seconds when opening the gui.
I don’t know if it’s related but I’ve been getting a visual glitch with the Vital plugin, it works correctly when opening the first time in the session but if I close the gui and then open it again various segments of the gui are blank though they work. But sometimes I get a crash with Vital too if I open and close the gui too often.
I uninstalled Ardour and got the following warning:
Warning: carla optionally requires lv2-host: for the LV2 plugin
Warning: carla optionally requires vst-host: for the VST plugin
Warning: rubberband optionally requires ladspa-host: for LADSPA plugin
Warning: zynaddsubfx optionally requires lv2-host: for using the LV2 plugin
Warning: zynaddsubfx optionally requires vst-host: for using the VST plugin
I searched around but don’t know how I’m supposed to implement these hosts.
I tried launching the plugins with Carla and got the same results as with Ardour (Zyn not launching and Vital launching correctly on first try but with artifacts on subsequent launches + eventual crash) so the issue is not Ardour but something with my machine and the plugins. Probably having to do with the lv2/vst/ladspa hosts?
Below is the log from the terminal when opening a new empty session in Ardour and lanching Zyn gui (LV2).
The distro I’m using is Manjaro KDE.
Ardour6.9.0 (built using 6.9 and GCC version 11.2.0)
Ardour: [INFO]: Your system is configured to limit Ardour to 524288 open files
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading system configuration file /etc/ardour6/system_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading user configuration file /home/gianluca/.config/ardour6/config
Ardour: [INFO]: CPU vendor: AuthenticAMD
Ardour: [INFO]: AVX-capable processor
Ardour: [INFO]: AVX with FMA capable processor
Ardour: [INFO]: CPU brand: AMD Ryzen 5 3500X 6-Core Processor
Ardour: [INFO]: Using AVX and FMA optimized routines
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading plugin meta data file /usr/share/ardour6/plugin_metadata/plugin_tags
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading plugin statistics file /home/gianluca/.config/ardour6/plugin_metadata/plugin_stats
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading default ui configuration file /etc/ardour6/default_ui_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading user ui configuration file /home/gianluca/.config/ardour6/ui_config
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading 452 MIDI patches from /usr/share/ardour6/patchfiles
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading color file /usr/share/ardour6/themes/dark-ardour.colors
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading ui configuration file /etc/ardour6/clearlooks.rc
Ardour: [INFO]: Loading bindings from /etc/ardour6/ardour.keys
Loading ui configuration file /etc/ardour6/clearlooks.rc
Found nothing along /home/gianluca/.config/ardour6/templates:/usr/share/ardour6/templates
Scanning folders for bundled LV2s: /usr/lib/ardour6/LV2
Set cursor set to default
Reading player:ZynAddSubFX took 1 microseconds, final size = 0
lo server running on 17010
[INFO] Opened the zynaddsubfx UI…
[INFO] Ready to run
[INFO:Zyn] zest_open()
[INFO:Zyn] zest_open(osc.udp://127.0.0.1:17010)
[INFO:Zyn] Found Assets at /usr/lib/zynaddsubfx/
[INFO:Zyn] Starting Zyn-Fusion
[INFO:Zyn] Thanks for supporting the development of this project
[INFO:Zyn] Creating MRuby Interpreter…
[debug] parsing json file
[debug] json parsed succesfully
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) ardour6
~ watched PID no longer exists - releasing device.
I tried debugging with gdb but wasn’t able to, I installed the program and tried running Ardour with it using the command:
/opt/ardour/bin/ardour6 --gdb
but turns out there is no Ardour directory in /opt.
I believe you have to buy the supported version for there to be Ardour in the /opt. https://community.ardour.org/download If you are using the Manjaro repository then I assume Ardour would not be installed in /opt, I could be wrong. Ardour is an LV2 host and also a vst host. LV2, vst and LADSPA are plugins formats that the Ardour host is capable of using/playing. I have not used carla but it might also be a program that can use/play LV2 vst and LADSPA plugins. The uninstall warnings might be telling you that you have removed the hosts the plugins need to be useful but I have no experience with Manjaro. Making everything work together that comes from the repo is an ongoing process in a rolling release distro maybe make some bug reports. Have you tried any of the other plugins that you can install from the repo, do they work?
Correct, ardour from a distribution repository will be in /usr/bin/ and ardour downloaded from Ardour.org will be in /opt/Ardour-.
Plugins should statically link any GUI toolkit needed, otherwise there is a possibility of conflict with the plugin host if the host and plugin are expecting different GUI library versions.
I do not know if that is the cause of the current problem with Zyn, but that was the case in 2017, and the release notes do not mention a change to static linking since then.
I do see noted in a discussion elsewhere that “upstream zyn-fusion LV2 is already fixed to statically link against those libs.”
I am not completely familiar with Zyn, so I am not sure if the currently shipping ZynAddSubFx versions are the same as what used to be referred to as zyn-fusion, but it appears that may be the case. If so, you may have better success using the LV2 plugins instead of VST.
Have you tried Yoshimi as a comparison? Yoshimi started out as a fork of Zyn 2.4, but has had a lot of changes since then, it may work if Zyn does not.
Hi studioinabox, thanks for the reply.
Indeed I installed Ardour from the Manjaro repository,
The reason for the warning being to let me know that I removed the hosts that those plugins use makes perfect sense, though I would expect also Vital to be flagged with Zyn and Carla. Maybe it works differtly idk
I installed and launched Helm and Surge and both seem to be working just fine, up to now the only plugins that have given me issues are Vital and Zyn.
I’d just move on and not use them, especially Zyn, but I’d like to follow some videos from Unfa and I saw that he uses them extensively.
I just tried Yoshimi as you suggested and it works fine (of course of all the plugins the only ones that have issues are the 2 I’m most interested to use…)
I just noticed also that I get different results if I use Vital LV2 or VST3 and Zyn LV2 or VST.
Vital LV2 works but if I close and reopen it gets some visual artifacts, with VST3 there are no issues.
Zyn LV2 is the one I described in the first post (opens blank window then crashes after a few seconds) while with VST it crashes immediately.
Thanks to your tips I got to run Ardour with gbd.
Here is the log for when I launched it and tried opening Zyn LV2 (though it didn’t crash, it just opened the blank window):
Thread 85 “RT-4-(nil)” received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0x7fff9b5eda00 (LWP 578012)]
0x00007ffff5e268d7 in ?? () from /usr/lib/liblilv-0.so.0
(gdb) quit
Glad you are up and running with Ardour, in my humble opinion the best DAW there is. I have experienced similar plugin problems and also with ZynAddSubFX as a plugin. Do you have the standalone version installed, there is a small chance that it needs to be installed in order for the plugin to work. Whilst you wait for the kinks to be ironed out in your chosen distro you can use the standalone version as “outboard” gear using Jack. Jack 1 comes with midi capabilities built in but if you use Jack 2 you have to also install a2jmidid, (run in terminal “a2jmidid -e” if i remember correctly to get the midi capability for Jack 2). I’m itching to play with Vital but I need a system upgrade before that can happen, I got Zynad to work by finding an earlier version to install and it sure is a powerhouse.
Yes, I’m excited to get to play around with Ardour, I installed the standalone to see if it solved anything but unfortunately no.
I tried to install the standalone ZynAddSubFx but I couldn’t figure out how after downloading it (I am a linux noob).
I installed a2jmidid and tried running “a2jmidid -e” but got an error…
This is the log when running it with gdb:
Reading symbols from a2jmidid…
(No debugging symbols found in a2jmidid)
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/a2jmidid
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library “/usr/lib/libthread_db.so.1”.
JACK MIDI <-> ALSA sequencer MIDI bridge, version 9 built on Sun Nov 29 23:19:07 2020
Copyright 2006,2007 Dmitry S. Baikov
Copyright 2007,2008,2009,2011,2012 Nedko Arnaudov
Bridge starting…
Using JACK server ‘default’
Hardware ports will not be exported.
[New Thread 0x7ffff718e640 (LWP 352393)]
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
[Thread 0x7ffff718e640 (LWP 352393) exited]
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
JackShmReadWritePtr::~JackShmReadWritePtr - Init not done for -1, skipping unlock
ERROR: a2j_jack_client_create: Cannot create jack client
ERROR: a2j_start: a2j_new() failed.
[Inferior 1 (process 352390) exited normally]
Do you have any idea what this could mean and how to solve it?
Thanks for the tips, maybe this is getting me to find what’s the crux of the issue
Edit: I managed to solve the issue with ajmidi by setting the interface to hw1 using QjackCtl. However I still get a crash with Zyn… The problem seems to be a conflict with Jack, as I get the following line:
It was never strictly required, just that MIDI timing performance with JACK v2 (which confusingly refers to versions 1.x.x) was not as good as with JACK v1. The current jackd maintainer says that was corrected in version 1.9.13, so any of the recent versions should run as well as JACK v1 without needing the external bridge.