I recently did a quick tute here for setting up LinVST in Ardour:
During the course of the tutorial (at approx. 6 minutes) with a pristine fresh first run of Ardour 6.7 it seemed to not scan for all Plugin types which for a new User will mean starting your first session without VST2/3 Plugins enabled and the necessity to find and root through the ‘Edit’–>‘Preferences’ Menu to do a complete second scan… This seems to not be an optimal first run experience…
Is this a bug or a feature with reasoning behind it?
Scanning for plugins on some systems can take well over 10 mins, sometimes even longer. It is really bad experience if the first thing a user has to do is wait and perhaps even experience plugin related crashes without ever seeing Ardour.
You do not have to visit preferences anymore. Since Ardour 6.6 the first time you show the Plugin Selector, there is a popup:
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PS. Note that LV2 plugins are always unconditionally discovered. Since LV2 meta-data is separate, LV2 plugins do not have to be explicitly scanned (as opposed to VST).
I must say I haven’t encountered that yet… I still think with the vast number of popular VST’s (and the added functionality of things like yabridge and LinVST) that either way seems kinda awkward to just get to work and start using Ardour but fair enough… I do understand there is no way of knowing what Users will have on the system and how well tolerated they will be on first scan though… *shrugs
On GNU/Linux it’s less of an issue, even with bridged plugins most of those that can be safely bridged are usually reliable. Also the total number is small enough for the plugin-scan to finish quickly and most plugins don’t slow things down by doing license checks either.
On AVLinux, you could perhaps pre-scan the plugins that are installed on the system.
Yes, In the past I did that, basically ran Ardour did all the scans and first time configs and populated it in /etc/skel so it copied over to the User on first install… It works, but it’s a slippery slope and you soon find yourself pre-configuring almost every program for some reason or other…
Then you forget about it and a new version of Ardour or whatever comes out and the stale config doesn’t work anymore or even worse causes the program not to run at all. So i agree with you it’s just a lot of fine details to keep track of…
