[linux-audio-user] Windows Audio Apps with latest Wine

[Shayne O'Connor]

Greetings all ...

i've been testing a few windows audio applications with the latest
version of wine, and have achieved some very interesting results. i
haven't been able to find many reports on these apps, so hopefully this
will be a pleasant surprise to most of you:

Steinberg Wavelab v4

works perfectly!! what's great is that, as far as i can tell, ALL vst
effect plugins work within wavelab. as far as i can tell, ALL audio
processing functionality is working - don't know about cd burning and
stuff, haven't tested that.

the ONLY problem with the program is that the drop-down menus are blank
- the top level is ok (the "File", "Edit", "View" etc) but beneath is
blank ... takes a little bit, but once you know where the important
buttons are, it's not that much of an issue.

one thing you might need to do when starting it up is to keep an eye out
for when it crashes (if it does) on start up. as the splash-screen comes
up, you'll see it scanning through your vst plugins directory (bottom
left corner). if it crashes, take note of which plugin it was scanning
at the time, and then go into the Wavelab/Presets/Plugins folder, open
the file "plugins to ignore.txt" and simply add the plugin that crashed
wavelab. repeat this process until it starts properly.

you can then go to the "options" menu, and choose the first blank space
on the drop-down - this will bring up the global options for wavelab,
allowing you to select soundcard driver etc ...

if you want to look at what i mean by the blank menus, then have a look
at these screenshots (n.b. - it seems to only be the static menus
affected - dynamically generated ones like the vst plugin selector and
undo/redo have no appearance problems):

http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/wavelab.png
http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/wavelab1.png

also, the audio-montage function seems to work too, though i have not
really tested it - when i was using windows, wavelab's audio-montage was
a big part of my radio work, and to see it functioning in linux is
incredible.

i must say too, that the audio quality is superb, though you'd probly
need a powerful machine to run smoothly.

Native Instruments Traktor DJ 2.53

works perfectly in all aspects of sound and gui. if you choose "asio
full duplex" driver from the options, you can get pretty good stability
and latency (the asio option, i think, only appears if you've installed
a steinberg product like cubase or nuendo - none of which i could get to
work, but at least the asio drivers seem to work ok). 

this is great news, as linux mp3 mixing software has a little way to go
yet before it approaches the sophistication of some of these windows
apps.

ImageLine Fruityloops Studio 5

Sort of works ... the only problem seems to be midi. vst instruments and
effects load up fine, but when choosing to add a midi channel to control
a vst instrument from within fruity, the whole program freezes. the gui
also suffers from patchiness - when windows open on top of the main
interface, closing them will leave a black hole which can be redrawn
from dragging the mouse over affected area.

the pre-loaded audio channels in the step-sequencer work fine.

fruityloops would be a killer-app to have fully-working in linux. i feel
it is REALLY close to working.



well, these are exciting enough for me at the moment, but i strongly
encourage people to upgrade their wine installations and start testing
these programs and others - when dedicated windows users start hearing
of their favourite audio apps working in linux, we'll start to see a LOT
more people here, and a LOT more heads to use for our open source sound
software (there are lots already, but the more the merrier). plus, some
of these programs rock.

just in case you have troubles replicating these results, here is my
pathetically haphazard wine cfg file:

http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/config

maybe one day soon, we could organise a group of us to organise a
structured crew of testers/debuggers/advocates to get a specified set of
programs working with wine ... wavelab and fruityloops look promising
because they already work to some degree, and if fully working, they
would really provide access to ALL the audio possibilities of windows on
linux (wavelab with its comprehensive audio processing/editing and
fruityloops with it's sequencing/vst-midi interface).

anyway, hope everyone can get something out of this :)

shayne





-- 
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fedora core 2 
kernel 2.6.9-2.2.rdt.rhfc2.ccrma
wine 20041201
xfce 4.2rc2
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asus a7n8x-x m/b
80 gb western digital caviar h/d
512mb generic ram
nvidia geforce mx400 agp 8x v/c
soundblaster live 5.1 platinum