Hi Cory,
Has something changed with being able to ship VST
support now?
JackLab does not use the GPL'd FST code, as far as I know. It uses the
LGPL'd wineasio, which may work around the linking problem that FST has.
However the VST and ASIO SDK's from Steinberg are still not redistributable.
It's not actually true that JackLab is the only audio distro with
support for wineasio - it works fine in the 32-bit build of 64 Studio:
http://www.64studio.com/howto_vst
The way we handle the redistribution problem is to have the installer
download any extra packages required, and build the binary on the local
machine. Obviously this is quite a brittle solution, because if
Steinberg change the location of their download then the package breaks
(not that it takes long to fix).
I recently spoke to an ex-employee of Steinberg who tried many times to
get the VST SDK released under GPL compatible licencing, while the
company was owned by Pinnacle. Now that it is owned by Yamaha, and there
are more Linux-based products in the pro-audio market, it might be worth
making a fresh approach.
Long-term though, we need native free software plugins, and I hope the
attention being given to VST support doesn't distract us from supporting
the LV2 standard. I'm hoping that people who aren't DSP programmers will
be able to help by creating GUIs and interface translations for LV2
plugins.
Cheers!
Daniel