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My main music machine is a Mac and my main everything else system is a Lenovo laptop with Pop!_OS. I would like to have the option to play with ideas on my Linux machine instead of having to switch systems when I feel inspired.
I already own the full version of Bitwig Studio butvI would love to throw some must have, Linux compatible, VST plugins into the mix.
Free sample sources would also be much appreciated.
Vital is... well, vital. There's also a huge collection of basic effects for Linux here: https://lsp-plug.in/
I also use a lot of windows vsts though yabridge.
Could you please provide a brief description of Vital? I'm in the process of rebuilding my musicmaking setup after a 15 years long hiatus, so I need to update myself on what's out there.
On that note, it looks like I'm gonna go for bitwig over Ardour. Any thoughts/opinions on that?
Vital is a vst similar to Serum, a pretty popular paid vst. It has a bunch of preset sounds but offers a lot of options for effects and automation to design your own sounds. I use it a ton personally and get a lot of range from it.
How well does yabridge work? I own a metric fuckton of VST plugins.
That said, I might keep my Linux system as a place to play with FOSS plugins, but I am still curious.
In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it's the closest thing to a native experience that I've come across.
You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.
You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there's a bit of a typical "how well does this work under wine" crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.
Reasonable well.
Getting plugins to install is often a big hurdle, if they are working, they work. However I think performance suffers alot. Didn't try it on any bigger synths yet tho.
I use it for spitfire labs, ott, and delay lama (very important) and all work great. There are occasional crashes when messing with parameters, but usually those don't happen more then once. I haven't noticed any performance issues.
Might depend on what DAW you use but I found it abit tedious to setup with Ardour, but after that it worked perfectly with the VSTs I was running on Windows, mainly Amplitube 5.
I look forward to trying yabridge, thank you for the link!
I wonder if these LSP Plugins work for Reaper on a Mac or Windows, gonna try it out but I expect it will have issues
Modartt's Pianoteq is a nice Linux native, physically modeled piano plugin.
I love Vital (Vitalium) and Zyn-Fusion. Surge and Odin are great too. all of them are open source and work great with bitwig.
Surge XT, it's LV2 but still awesome
Also I'm a zynaddsubfx / yoshimi die hard. Not for everyone but it can do almost everything if you can live with 8bit automation parameters
SurgeXT supports VST; LV2 is actually unsupported for recent releases: https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/changelog/
Uhoh, I'm using the LV2. Do you guys really run the VST through WINE? I was glad, I didn't have to look into that...
You can run vsts natively on Linux these days... Not that I actually do 😹but surge may make me give it a shot, I didn't know LV2 is unsupported
Ah, I didn't know more modern versions of the VST standard specified a Linux interface. I thought, they were still just basically EXEs with some metadata attached.
VST is native and actually better for the CPU in the SurgeXT case. I also use it in LV2, and now I've all my projects that needs a conversion from that, maybe I could compile the 1.2 version from source; I don't know but it's annoying ¢_¢ [edit] Oh yeah, I've found it here so I can save my presets! https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/s/
There's also a CLAP version available, if you use a daw that supports CLAP (like REAPER (which you should totally use btw (it's like the emacs of daws if emacs actually ran faster than everything else)))
The u-he synths are nice.
do plugins that run on wine count?
They do, but I think that I am going to try to keep my Linux system with only native plugins.
Just use Windows VSTs! This video was a game changer for me. Turned my vanilla Linux Mint into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency. Incedible!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
unrelated but does Ableton work with Linux yet? I did a quick search and someone says it works "flawlessly" but the comments indicate this is not true.
Surge XT is a must. Best FOSS synth there is IMO. 3 oscillators in 2 scenes. Filters, effects, all the LFOs and envelopes in the world, all the modulation, expression aftertouch, etc you need. A bunch of presets out of the box. Very flexible synth, though can be a bit learning curve to get going.
Honorable mentions to Dexed (basically a software DX7), GeonKick (for synthesizing drums), and pianoteq (proprietary, but best there is in piano synth with native linux support).
FL Studio works fine in Linux if u install it thru Wine
I use Bitwig Studio as my Linux native DAW.
I'm no musician or whatever, more a hobbyist regarding that. I've used lmms to compose some tunes. Is Bitwig somewhat comparable?
Bitwig was created by some of the people that built Abelton Live. Bitwig is considered by many to be the best of them all and easier to pick up by beginners. I plan to try it on Linux before I decide if I make the jump from Abelton.
I tried it and it worked fine, but didn't try to install any 3rd party plugins. Do they work too?
Been thinking about setting it up again if so.
Yup, I use Fabfilter and native instruments stuff
Amazing! I know what I'm doing tonight!