Struggling with plugins

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

I try to get the LSP plugins working. I have downloaded version 1.1.1 for x86_64 linux from the LSP site. The LADSPA plugins are unpacked in a directory and environment variable LADSPA_PATH points to this directory. The LXVST plugins are unpacked in another directory and environment variable LXVST_PATH points to this directory.

The LADSPA plugins are correctly loaded, but many (most?) are not functional. They just seem to do nothing.
According to some hints elsewhere in the forum, I installed the Ardour demo from the site, with same results.

The LXVST plugins are not loaded at all. When scanned, all individual .so files are processed, no errors are signaled, definitely no timeouts, but in the log window the message “VST Blacklist:” appears, followed by all the plugins. Clearing the blacklist before scanning does not make a difference.

Apparently, I’m doing something very basic wrong. Any helpful suggestions?

#2

Gotta ask the basics first, You are running the 64 bit version of Ardour correct?

   Seablade
#3

The system is Fedora27 64-bit.
This looks correct to me: /opt/Ardour-5.12.0/bin/ardour-5.12.0: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=6022fe9810f1376a8fbebd25078f11a41ee2b600, stripped
The Fedora version of Ardour has been removed to avoid conflicts.

This is how the scanning dialog looks:
http://www.squirrel.nl/pub/xfer/uploads/3Ckac9vj0oCTmL8Q_yRWwvCg.png

An average plugin:
lsp-plugins-vst-sc-compressor-stereo.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=e9a8fa33cdd554e0b952601bb4ecf0868b085252, stripped

#4

I just noted that you talk about LADSPA. There’s no LADSPA anymore. All modern Linux plugins are LV2, and Ardour finds them using the LV2 libraries. LADSPA_PATH has nothing to do with it. Was that just a mistyping?

#5

The LSP plugins are distributed in several variants, including LADSPA, LV2 and LXVST. You mean that Ardour doesn’t support LADSPA anymore? I see quite a few LADSPA plugins in the plugin manager. Confusing.

I’ve now installed the LV2 variants and set LV2_PATH to the install location. The plugins load fine and seem functional as fas as I tried them, in both the demo version and the Fedora packaged version of Ardour.

I have no idea what goes wrong with the LADSPA and LXVST variants, though.

#6

LADSPA plugins have no GUIs of their own. Ardour supports LADSPA, and provides its own “Generic UI” for editing the plugin parameters. In general, if there’s an LV2 version of a plugin, there’s no reason to even think about the LADSPA version. LV2 is the improved version of the LADSPA plugin API; LADSPA has no benefits over LV2.

#7

LSP LV2 plugins work just fine here on debian. Check with lv2ls | grep lsp if they’re installed in the correct path (Fedora is known to ignore http://lv2plug.in/pages/filesystem-hierarchy-standard.html )

If you do prefer VST for some reason, note that LXVST_PATH is irrelevant, i’s only used to pre-seed the initial config setting. Use Preferences > Plugins > VST …

#8

When trying to load the LXVST variants of the plugins, I still get all of them blacklisted. No error messages on the console or the log window. What could be going wrong?

#9

Apologies for bumping this old topic, but I’m now getting this behaviour with Ardour 6 on my new laptop (Fedora 33), while it worked fine with Ardour 5 on Fedora 32.

Basically any time I try to re-scan my LinVST plugins after clearing caches/blacklists, they all end up in the VST blacklist. No error or additional information is displayed in the log window, or the stdout console for that matter, apart from the “VST blacklist” line followed by all the .so files that were rejected (all of them). I tried looking for ways to increase the verbosity of the logs, to see if I could find any indication of what’s causing the plugins to being blacklisted, but with no luck.

From what I could read in other responses to similar threads, Ardour can blacklist a plugin if it failed to be run properly during a test, or if you’re trying to run a 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit Ardour. While the Windows DLL I’m using are 32-bit, the LinVST process generates a 64-bit .so for Linux, which I believe means it shouldn’t be an issue (but I may be wrong?); as I was saying, this definitely worked on my previous version of Fedora and Ardour, which was 64-bit too, so had it been an issue of 32/64 I guess it should have failed back then too. The Windows DLLs I’m trying to launch do work fine when opened via jack-dssi-host (dssi-vst.so), which seems to suggest wine is not the problem either.

Is there any way I can debug what is causing Ardour 6 to blacklist those VSTs? Thanks!

#10

Assuming you got Ardour from ardour.org, try to scan a VST2.x plugin manually from the commandline as follows:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/Ardour-6.5.0/lib/ /opt/Ardour-6.5.0/lib/ardour-vst-scanner -f /path/to/the/vst.so

As opposed to VST3, Ardour’s VST2 scan process is not very verbose.

#11

Ah, I wasn’t aware of that, thanks for the tip! Just tried with one of the VSTs, and I got this:

LinVst Error: lin-vst-server not found or vst dll load timeout or LinVst version mismatch
[ERROR]: ** ERROR ** VSTFX : Mini_DiZi could not be instantiated :frowning:

which does give me something to look into. I’ll check if my LinVST setup is broken somewhere.

#12

Turned out the issue was the scanner expected lin-vst-servertrack32.exe to be in /usr/bin, while it was in $HOME/.local/bin for me: now it’s fixed. Thanks for the precious tip!