Hi there!
I’ve created a Bottle that contains the SpitfireAudio and downloaded the discovery orchestra (you know, that free one). How can I make ardour read that vst? I’ve tried making a path towards it but I’m just getting “Invalid Module Path” error. I’ve tried yabridge but it doesn’t seem to work on my system. Does anyone have an idea?
Thanks a lot!
yabridge is your best bet for this. Bottles and so forth are not suitable for running plugins.
Hey Paul thanks for the reply! Do you have any guide of shorts so I can figure out how to make this work? Also why not us bottles? It seems it’s the way to install spitfire if I’m right…
To quote from the Flatpak developer documentation:
One of Flatpak’s main goals is to increase the security of desktop systems by isolating applications from one another. This is achieved using sandboxing and means that, by default, applications that are run with Flatpak have extremely limited access to the host environment.
Audio plugins run in the same process space as the host application, so “isolating applications” is the opposite of what you need, and would not allow a plugin to run.
FYI Bottles != Flatpak
Bottles in this case refers to a Wine Bottle, really a window environment to run applications in. It is not sandboxed in anywhere near the same way that flatpaks are. That being said, as @paul mentions, it is not really appropriate to try to run plugins like this, you still have to load them into an environment capable of operating them which is effectively what yabridge attempts to do, and is part of the reason it is the most obvious choice for this.
Sadly I do not have a guide as I haven’t attempted to run windows plugins on Linux in quite some time.
Seablade
OK, thanks for the clarification. I found a reference to bottles on Flathub and mistakenly thought they were part of Flatpak (and the bottles github page notes that “Bottles is officially provided as a Flatpak”).
That makes more sense now since the software in question is Windows.
I have no familiarity at all with how Yabridge would interact with bottles, so some of the users who use Windows software regularly would have to help advise.
So I have to setup yabridge properly and it takes just that? No need for other software etc? If anyone has used it please respond 
yabridge is a bridge between the windows environment and Ardour. You have to set up yabridge first, then you get to find out if your plugin in particular can work in this environment. There is no guarantee it will.
Keep in mind what you are doing is attempting to run software written for a completely different OS, in LInux, and not only that, within a piece of software written for Linux. The fact it works ever is frankly amazing in itself. I would NOT depend on this for anything critical.
Seablade
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I have tried to install Spitfire on my AVLinux system, and the gui is just messed up enough that it’s unusable. Wine 7.20 staging, with yabridge 5.0.5. I have a separate system updating which has Wine 8.11, which I’ll check in a little bit, but don’t hold your breath.
Same result with 8.11. I think it may work for some, and if you google “linux wine spitfire”, you’ll get lots of material to search. Not high on my priority list. 
I had/have GUI issues with Modalics plugins via yabrdige (what a shame). I dug into it somewhat and discovered that recent versions of JUCE (used by many plugin developers) utilize some relatively new aspects of the WIndows GUI subsystem that require Vulkan support in the Linux video driver(s) that is either brand new or non-existent. For example, the Radeon driver included with Debian 11 does not have this support.
So even though yabridge is doing it’s job completely as it should, the plugin GUI is unusable because it never updates.
Doesn’t mean that explains any specific issues anyone else has faced, but I thought it worth mentioning.
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Ja, there’s a vendor who uses webview2 for the gui of some of his plugins, and that doesn’t work with straight Wine. Apparently it’s possible to install webview2 with winetricks, but that is too dicey for me. 95% of my stuff works great. I have much more than I could possibly, reasonably need.
What I find strange is that Bottles create a path to “real” directories in a drive_c etc, which contain all the stuff needed, but when I ask ardour to use this path it returns the mentioned error. Why it doesn’t work like the other VST3s?
Because you are asking Ardour to use a plugin that is compiled for Windows, this is not something Ardour does, and is a EXTREMELY complex situation as I mentioned above.
Every plugin is compiled for the operating system it runs on and the architecture of the computer. Generally you cannot run things not compiled for your OS and architecture. You are trying to break this rule, and while it is possible with the correct tools (Wine/yabridge), it is nowhere near perfect.
And really what Ardour loads as a plugin in those cases isn’t the VST3 itself, but rather yabridge, which loads the wine environment, and then the VST, which is why it yabridge is referred to as a ‘bridge’
Seablade
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Ardour doesn’t need to know where the plugins/bottles are. Yabridge deals with that. You start by telling yabridge where the plugin is, then tell it to ‘sync’, which puts a plugin in a Sensible Place in your home directory. If it’s a vst3 plugin you may then need to add ~/.vst3 to VST3 paths in ardour preferences. There are full instructions at GitHub - robbert-vdh/yabridge: A modern and transparent way to use Windows VST2, VST3 and CLAP plugins on Linux. Bear in mind that “bottles”=“wine prefixes.”
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Bottles are designed to run applications.
You are trying to run a plugin, which as explained before requires a host application (you currently want to use Ardour for this). The host plugin cannot load a “bottle”. It has to load (just) the bare VST plugin. The bottle infrastructure is irrelevant for this purpose. However, as others have pointed out, VST plugins are OS specific, you have a Windows VST plugin and are trying to use it on Linux. This requires some special technology, hence the need to use yabrdige or something similar. Bottles cannot help you here.
Now, bottles could be useful if you wanted to run a standalone Windows application, and there are a few plugins that come as both a plugin and a standalone. However, AFAIK, Spitfire sample playback engines (like the BBC Orchestra) are not among them.
OK so I will dive more into yabrigde and try to make it work for me and reach back to you!
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You could try Virtual Playing Orchestra, which is similar to Spitfire BBCSO. Things will work better and less pain for you
Yes I’ve considered that one and actually downloaded already. The sound quality is my first concern and the fact that I don’t know how to use sfz.
FWIW, I am (once again) successful with using BBCSO Discovery / Core in Ardour on AVLinux: I’ve update the wine-staging to 8.11-1mx21+1, and used the Spitfire Library application’s “repair” feature to re-download the plugins / samples.