I have a rather large set of VSTs that do not work correctly in Ardour or Mixbus32C in Win 10, most notably a new Steinberg Halion 7 collection. All of these VSTs have stand alone app versions which work fine on the Windows desktop.
Is there a way for me to record these external apps without going outside the box? Is that 'JACK on Windows?
Currently I’m routing the apps out through a spdif output, converting to analog, and then recording through a Focusrite USB device. I’d like to simplify things if possible. However my ancient history with JACK doesn’t leave me wanting to go that way, but maybe it’s much better today?
What are real user’s experience with JACK on Windows as a day-to-day way of working?
It would be great to get to the bottom of this and fix Ardour/Mixbus.
Harrison has just tried this on a Windows 11 system (with Ardour 7.3.179) Steinberg HALion 7 VST3 works just fine, scans correctly, produces sound and also the state is restored when the session is reloaded.
I don’t doubt that Mark has genuine issue with those plugins, but so far there is no obvious reason why we cannot reproduce them
Is anyone else using those plugins?
I do not know about JACK, but have you considered loading the plugins inside a meta-plugin in Ardour? Add KX Studio’s Carla-Rack in Ardour and then load the plugin in Carla, or use Plogue’s bidule as wrapper? Does that help with the issues you’re having?
I appreciate the effort you are applying. I think we will eventually get there. We still have the issue of which VST spec everything is built against. For me, as best I can tell, the ones that are failing are all on fairly new VST specs. Newer than the one you said Ardour was built against earlier. I don’t even want to call this a ‘bug’ until you have a chance to update to the spec version that the Halion 7 family is built against.
And I agree - I don’t know why my machine would be the only one that fails but if it was to turn out that way - if others got the full blown Halion 7 package and they all worked - well then that would be strange also.
TO BE CLEAR - when I tested the Halion 7 demo to consider buying it I played with all the apps on the Windows desktop but I NEVER used the VSTs inside of Ardour or Mixbus32C. (My bad!) While I think it’s unlikely, it’s possible the demo versions work and the full version doesn’t. I doubt it because I think the difference is just making the license valid, but in my case I removed the demo version which I obtained from Steinberg and bought the full version from my sales guy at Sweetwater. It could be some sort of interaction because of the way I got to where I am. (Which is what most of my friends say about me anyway…)
Sorry - I forgot to answer your last question. I haven’t considered it very seriously but mostly because I don’t know what’s out there and often these conversations aren’t very clear about Windows vs Linux as an OS platform.
KX Studio’s Carla-Rack looks interesting. I’ll investigate vs using Cubase LE the same way. Probably depends a lot on whether the Windows Jack-ASIO actually works and what it allows.
So far I’m not trying to run any of these VSTs in Linux. I just tried the Crossover products to attempt to use an old GigaStudio version which is 32-bit only. That failed and cost me a day messing with computers. I’m hesitant to go down some sort of home-brew path looking for solutions. If I need to I can run all the VSTs in Cubase in Windows and record in Mixbus on another box until we figure out what’s going on.