I had a VST plugin I REALLY find useful that stopped working as of my session with Ardour today. I did not update this plugin. I did recompile Ardour a couple of times, the same way I did when this plugin was working.
The version of Ardour is 2.8.11.
The plugin is this one: http://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
I know, nothing is guaranteed. But it was already working before I recompiled Ardour. I would very much like to get it working again.
(We’re sorry, spam filter, this is not spam.)
Did wine get updated ?
This is fairly normal when using Windows VSTs on an operating system that was never intended to run them. Its quite remarkable that it works at all, ever, and is a tribute to the superb work done by the WINE devs. However it should be considered an absolute last resort, since if you change anything (anything at all e.g. sometimes even if the wind direction changes or the phase of the moon etc), it may stop working. You should certainly not rely on it for any critical work. That said, one of the most common causes of problems is a new version of WINE re-arranging the bugs a little.
I did change to a different version of Wine, actually. I think I forced a downgrade for some reason, but I don’t remember at the mo.
Well, does anyone know a good frequency graph program that can be configured to show down to 10 Hz? I’m not attached to THIS VST plugin if I can find an adequate LV2 or LADSPA replacement.
I’m not sure if you’ll find an LV2 or LADSPA plugin that can do what you want (especially LADSPA since LADSPA has no GUI) but there are some excellent jack applications for all kinds of audio analysis here
http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/
I’m thinking that the jaaa - jack / alsa audio analyser might do what you need. You can patch jack applications into ardour either directly onto the master outputs or by setting up an insert point in a channel.
Thanks for that info. It looks like Jaa and Japa are exactly what I need!
Dear board: this is not spam. K THX BAI.
Sheesh. I can barely read the spam-o-troller. I even get it wrong sometimes. Medic!
I got the Voxengo SPAN VST plugin working just fine through vsthost, so I suspect the problem could be with Ardour, and not with anything else.
Either way, I’m just happy it works. I just could not find a spectrum analyser that would let me modify the frequency axis to show <20 Hz.
A couple of thoughts occurred to me since my last post. And no, the thoughts did not hurt. 
If vstplugin doesn’t use an instance of Wine, then the problem could still be Wine and not Ardour, but…
The same thing also happens with other plugins made for Linux. Basically, when those plugins are selected, nothing happens. No error appears and no plugin shows up.
So I would think it’s not a Wine problem. Maybe it’s something fixed in a later build of Ardour and I should recompile it.
@audiodef - if you use a windows VST plugin on linux, you will be using WINE at some point - AFAIK there is no other way to get a binary compiled for windows to run on linux, which is essentially what you are doing when you load up a windows VST either into ardour or into an external jack based VST host.
What other plugins (made for linux) are you trying to use which don’t show up?
Here’s one, for example: Fast Lookahead Limiter.
I use this in my master bus. Right click -> Limiter -> Fast Lookahead Limiter. Nothing.
But when I move one menu entry down to Limiters (with an “s”), the entry by the same name works.
Did you compile ardour from source? (and which version of ardour are you using?) perhaps your build of ardour does not have LV2 support compiled in?
Yep, compiled from source, and it does have LV2 compiled in.
@audiodef: That’s very strange - I have the same version running here with both those plugins and they both show up. I think the one listed under ‘Limiter’ is an LV2 and the one listed under ‘Limiters’ is the LADSPA version which would suggest that there is something not right with LV2 support in your build (I’m getting this from looking through the .ttl files for the lv2 stuff and its late so I might have read it wrong…)
One way to tell for certain if you really have LV2 support compiled in is to run ldd on the ardour binary, so for example, if you compiled and installed ardour with a prefix /usr then you might do
ldd /usr/lib/ardour2/ardour-2.8.11
at the command line, and see if the output shows a reference to libslv2 anywhere - this would indicate that you do have LV2 support in your build. If not then you don’t.
if you used the default prefix of /usr/local then you might need:
ldd /usr/local/lib/ardour2/ardour-2.8.11