Hi! Happy New Year to Paul, Robin and all the great minds involved in Ardour!
I have a situation where my son who has been an Ardour user for years is off in University with a Windows computer he needs for school and he wants to use Ardour on Windows while away and then be able to move sessions to our Studio Linux computer with Ardour when home… I realize our Plugin choices will be limited and I’ve suggested to keep the list very short with cross platform VST stuff we know and use already. I understand that if he only used Ardour and it’s included community LV2 Plugins that theoretically it should be able to go back and forth from Win to Lin.
How does it work with VST’s? As an example if he used the u-he Presswerk VST3 on Windows and opened a session with the Presswerk Linux VST3 on Linux will Ardour be able to identify and load the Plugin or not? Further to that if a Windows Plugin was used on Linux via yabridge will the bridged Win VST be recognized as a regular Windows VST on Ardour running on Wndows?
Yes it should work. We have tested that with both VST2 and VST3 in the past. As long as you use the same version of the plugin (same ID, same number of controls) it works.
The Harrison XT (LV2) and AVA (VST2) plugins are known to translate nicely in sessions across platforms. – As usual with plugins there are likely some where it fails for one reason or another. If you stumble one one please file a bug report and if Ardour can do something about it we might be able to fix it.
Keep in mind that to transfer sessions, zip them up (or use Ardour’s Session Archive) because Ardour sessions are case-sensitve (fine with NTFS, but an issue with VFAT used on most USB devices).
This is worrying. Do Univ really require Windows for classes or homework?
A plan B would be to run AVLinux live from USB, or dual-boot when making music.
Not sure what program Glenn’s son is studying, but it is often that while not required, it is highly recommended. For instance for my students, if you are focused on theatrical sound (My area of teaching) it is highly recommended to have a Mac due to QLab being an industry standard and you will be working in it, Vectorworks for drafting, etc. There are just to many things that are OS specific, that are a bad idea to try to run via Wine or even virtualization. Keep in mind I ran LInux mostly through college when I was a student, but it is a bit different now than it was then.
Now as long as you can complete the work, I really don’t care what you have, but when I get asked for a minimum recommended requirement for technology for students, I am basing it off of what the average student should have and is based around a Mac currently as the other thing is that I want them to have tools that will allow them to work immediately after college (I mean that should be the goal, for students to graduate and work).
Now that doesn’t mean that people couldn’t show up with other tools, frankly so long as you can complete the tasks I don’t care what you use really, but I have often found students hamstringing themselves and making their student lives harder by purchasing the wrong equipment, and hten not being able ot use that equipment to work afterwards as well.
Well, it’s not mandatory, so ‘needs’ may be too strong a term, however he also games and his fave Video Editor is Vegas and MS Office isn’t the only game in town but it has zero compatibility issues so let’s say there is not sufficient reason to remove the OS the computer came with to simply work on some demos. With games and Video projects space is a factor so a dual boot or USB boot is probably not going to be preferred. Ardour on Windows is already installed and seemingly working smoothly so I think we’ll just experiment with a short list of commonly used stuff across platforms and work out from there…
The session archiving tip is great info to know, thanks!