At the risk that this question has been asked 100 times, I’m asking it.
I’m wondering why does the windows VST support isn’t bundled in ardour main packages b\c, afaik, wine is just used to emulate the VST wrapper when needed, and so it could be possible to just package it in the main releases, which could attract way more peoples on linux in the near future.
It would also attract ‘way more’ support issues. There are many reasons why things can go wrong with Ardour, Windows VST and Wine.
Especially now, there is a Windows version of Ardour which supports the use of Windows VST’s, so why not use that in a real Windows OS if you must use Windows VST plugins?
If attracting issues is an issue in itself, why work ona project that big? Also there’s a lot of reason why not go on windows, surely way less in the music industry than the programming one though. I can still quote issues which needs you to modify a kernel, custom devices that cannot be recognized easily on windows, windows beeing WAY TOO HEAVY for bundled in devices in a studio, etc…
Don’t get me wrong, I know how hard it is to handle a project like that, but if no progress is ever made on this side, it’ll never go forward.
See http://manual.ardour.org/working-with-plugins/windows-vst-support/ for a better explanation of the problem. At the core of it is that fact that Wine keeps changing.
AV Linux gets round this by bundling a specific version of Wine tested and known to work with the included Ardour-VST, but if you install or even build ArdourVST on, say, Ubuntu you have no guarantee that the version of Wine with that came with Ubuntu will work with the version of Ardour you have just installed, and no amount of Ardour development will solve that problem. (and I don’t believe maintaining a special fork of Wine is a sensible use of Ardour developers’ time)
It would be better to persuade plugin developers to support Linux, like OvertoneDSP does.
@GovanifY: The best operating system to run Windows VSTs is Windows. WINE is an incredible achievement, but fundamentally you are trying to run binaries compiled for a completely different operating system. (If I were cynical, I might say there are enough compatibility problems running linux plug-ins on linux, without introducing a compatibility layer for a completely different OS…) In addition, my understanding is that Ardour with Windows VST support effectively turns Ardour into a WINE application, therefore its not a case of simply calling upon WINE when needed - it would potentially affect the whole stability of the application, irrespective of whether you were using Windows plug-ins in a session or not).
In my opinion, WINE is best used as a last resort if there’s an essential plug-in / application for which no native linux version exists. Compatibility is heavily dependent on the particular version of WINE, and there’s no guarantee that just because something appears to work today, that it won’t just start refusing to run for all manner of nebulous and unfathomable reasons, potentially rendering a session unusable. Various (Windows) plug-ins are now also available for linux, aided by the fact that Ardour on linux does support VSTs natively compiled for linux.
There is always the option, to use Carla as a bridge to Windows DLL VST. Try to put CarlaLV2 in a Track in Ardour and load WinVST in taht Instance of Carla.
That is also possible in Bitwig with Carla VSTX.
As of now it is not stable though…
As Mike already mentioned: the statement “wine is just used to emulate the VST wrapper when needed” is not correct. The Linux version of Ardour which can load Windows VSTs is basically a windows application running completely inside wine (it’s really some hybrid: a wine-application).
So far this is only feasible for distributions which include wine packages along with the specific applications. eg. KXStudio (Carla), AVLinux.
Bundling wine along with Ardour itself is not a realistic option, but it recently became possible to build Ardour-binaries with windows-VST support targeting specific distros known to have wine (here: AVLinux). There no plans to provide official support for this, however.
Oh, I thougt wine dynamically loaded the wrapper, yeah if the whole app is loaded through wine it’s not a reliable option, thanks for the answers.