An open-source sinth Surge!
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Yeah, I’ve also been checking Surge out recently, and it’s pretty interesting! For those who don’t know, this was a formerly commercial synth that’s been around for a while, and the author recently open sourced it because they no longer had time to develop it. The linux port does still seem to be WIP and has some issues, some of which are displayed in that video—like Ardour doesn’t list it as an instrument and you need to set the track to flexible I/O (or manually connect the outputs). It’s also only available as VST, and I did have a couple crashes (when rapidly changing presets while testing it). I also had to install a library that wasn’t available in the Debian repos to get it to work (libxcb-util1, if anyone else happens to run into the same issue). But overall it seems to function, sounds fairly decent, comes with a decent number of presets, and has some pretty cool modulation options!
Oh, is the xcb util still a thing? I thought I had fixed that?
Yeah, I tried again with the most recent nightly build of Surge, and I can’t get it to work without installing libxcb-util1. With the libxcb-util0 version provided by Debian, Ardour just blacklists the plugin when scanning VSTs.
dpkg also doesn’t give any errors when installing the Surge .deb, so it took me a while to figure out that the issue was caused by a dependency problem…
Really nice synth!
Unfortunately I have like a lot of missing text. Basically all the drop down menus display no text at all. Most of the fader’s labels are also blank.
Maybe it’s just a missing font thing? But installation went kind of ok, the only error was:
Can't translate pathname 'usr/share/Surge/patches_factory/Monosynth/µcomputer.fxp' to UTF-8
I’m using Arch and installed Surge via AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/surge-synthesizer-bin/)
Any hints?
I’ll look into that.
I got the same error / warning installing that AUR package, but it seems to still work correctly for me, just fyi!
Ok, thank you.
I’ve got exactly the same kind of issues with Surge in Carla (stand alone) - no labels, no text in menus.
I tried to launch ardour from terminal and see what happens when Surge is loaded.
Here’s output:
scalable/bmp00110.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@15x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@2x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@3x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@4x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@15x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@2x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@3x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@4x.png not found
BackingDisplayFactor is not implemented on linux. Returning 1.0
BackingDisplayFactor is not implemented on linux. Returning 1.0
open 0x7f3e486a57e0 0x2800002
registerEventHandler 46 0x7f3e48202270
registerTimer 16 0x7f3e486a5180
registerTimer 16 0x7f3e480071a0
Carla’s log shows pretty much the same:
scalable/bmp00110.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@15x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@2x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@3x.png not found
scalable/bmp00110@4x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@15x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@2x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@3x.png not found
scalable/bmp00150@4x.png not found
BackingDisplayFactor is not implemented on linux. Returning 1.0
Carla assertion failure: "fUI.window != nullptr" in file CarlaPluginVST2.cpp, line 2049
BackingDisplayFactor is not implemented on linux. Returning 1.0
open 0x557d29bcdba0 0x3a00001
registerEventHandler 48 0x557d29ed1520
registerTimer 16 0x557d29d47e30
registerTimer 16 0x557d29d96260
So clearly there are some missing elements.
Do you guys have these warnings too?
Using the VST plugin on Debian testing (nightly build 2019-04-06-debd603, installed from the .deb package available at the website), I get the same messages roithamer quoted, but text works fine and I don’t see anything obvious missing.
When I open and close menus in the GUI I also get a bunch more registerTimer and unregisterTimer messages. Are these maybe just debug messages that shouldn’t actually be displayed in a release version? I know I’m on a nightly build, I don’t know if the beta version has the same output…
Thank you for information. I’ll try to investigate further.
EDIT
Ok this is weird.
I tried this on kde (my default de is xfce) and it was ok - all the text and labels were there. But what is strange - when I rebooted into xfce it was also ok… Well whatever… Now it just works…
this all seems like packaging erros
I’ll have a look at the aur package
a link would be appreciated 
W…Wait I’m confused 
What link?
The register timer stuff is indeed debug messages.
The link I requested was to the aur package but I’ve already found it.
The aur package takes the debian package and converts it to arch.
I don’t know enough about that but if it works it works. If not, then I’m not surprised.
Rghvdberg, thanks for you contributions!
Tested today again v.1.6.1.1 - installs and runs well under Ardour 5.12 Ubuntu 18.04.2!
Interesting to know will Claes open shortcircuit sampler? )
Just tried this in Arch with Ardour 6 and it doesn’t detect it as an instrument. After loading it and manually connecting the audio outputs, it’s really laggy and slows down my framerate when the display is loaded. Anyone experiencing similar? I’m using KDE plasma latest and Nvidia proprietary drivers.
Yes the same on ubuntu studio 19.10on a intel video.
The vst works better than the lv2 that crashed my ardour when opening the gui but all controls are laggy.
Is it just me that get a surge gui on ardour 6 without any sound (Ardour 6 pulseaudio backend), Helm, Geonkick and Zyn-Fusion though has working sound on ardour 6.
I have had a few problems with audio not coming through recently. I have to disconnect from Jack server and then reconnect within Ardour and then it works.
OK yeah same here. At least the VST version is detected as an instrument and doesn’t crash. But the GUI is still really laggy.
Oh im glad that it wasn’t just my system that was messed up, its the same for me with pulseaudio.